


Resol'nare

by Solériane (SombrePlume)



Series: The Dark Path Between the Stars [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Because come on, Ben Lars - Freeform, Complete, Domestic, Family, Gen, Jedi, Kid Fic, Mando'a, Mostly Gen, Multi, Open Ending, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash, Pre-slow burn, canon and legends were slowly roasted over a pit then carved for juicy bits, clone feels, doesnt follow canon, doesnt follow legends, gai bal manda, gen - Freeform, i just take what I want and leave the rest, mandalorian culture, mandalorian culture adapted to a jedi way of life, non-blissful domesticity, not canon, there is nothing blissful about babies, this verse will have a very diversified cast, wandering midichlorians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2018-07-16 11:45:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7266859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SombrePlume/pseuds/Sol%C3%A9riane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em> "How do you propose to raise these children, then, Commander Rex?" Bail asked politly. </em><br/>"Ba'jur, beskar'gam, ara'nov, aliit, Mando'a bal Oya'la kot. An vencuyan mhi."<br/><em>Education, armor, self-defense, clan, Mando'a and the Force. All help us survive. </em><br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Survival, In Six Acts

**Author's Note:**

> Credits to [Flamethrower](http://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/pseuds/flamethrower) for the "wandering midichlorians" concept. If you haven't already, go check out her fics: hers are some of the very best out there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [Alyyks](http://archiveofourown.org/users/alexiel_neesan/pseuds/alyyks) for betaing the thing. I added to it after, though, so all remaining typos are of my own doing.

Obi-Wan was stumbling through the station's darkened corridors, trying not to think—too much pain, too much sadness, too fucking tired—when he spied movement from the corner of his eyes and instinctively turned to follow it.

For an instant, as Rex whirled and pointed his blaster at him, Obi-Wan thought that everything had been a lie: the commander's claim that the clones didn't voluntarily execute Order 66, his assurance that his and Echo's own chips had been taken out, the help they had offered him on Utapau and then in getting back to Coruscant, his seemingly sincere  _ pain _ when they had entered the Temple and seen what had befallen its inhabitants… 

Had he faked all of it? Were he and Echo pawns of Palpatine and Ana— _ Vader _ ? 

For an instant, the possibility disheartened him so much he didn't even reach for his lightsaber. His heart was already shattered in a million pieces and letting the clone commander—his  _ friend _ , or so he had believed—shoot him would be so easy. Then, at last, the horrible series of betrayals would come to an end and he wouldn't have to see the galaxy plunge further into darkness. 

For an instant… only for an instant, though. An instant before he spotted Echo lurking in the shadows behind Rex, arms full of sleeping newborns. Panic made him act, using the Force to slap the blaster out of alignment and seize Rex by the throat, before pointing his powered up lightsaber under Echo's chin. 

"Where did you think you were taking these children, troopers?"

Echo, usually so eager to obey the proper chain of command, only squared his jaw and glowered, refusing to answer. 

"Commander Rex?" probed Obi-Wan, releasing his Force-grip just enough to let the man speak. It was an error Rex immediately exploited, twisting and using the wall as leverage to kick him in the shoulders. Obi-Wan probably should have anticipated it: after all, this particular trooper had easily kept up with Ana— with  _ Anakin _ (please, please, let it have been Anakin and not Vader already, he couldn't stand the thought of having been  _ that _ fucking blind) for years. 

Rather than take advantage of his surprise to flee, though, Rex jumped on him and  _ pushed _ with all his might. Taken off guard—there had been some  _ Force _ behind that shove, what the entire fuck, that was  _ impossible— _ Obi-Wan suddenly found himself flat on his back, his jaw squeezed quite uncomfortably by a gauntleted hand. 

Rex's eyes were shining with anger and—were those  _ tears _ ? Obi-Wan was so damn tired, he wasn't sure of anything anymore. But exhausted or not, he wasn't about to let the twins get kidnapped by…

"I'm not letting you separate them." The words took a moment to register, making Obi-Wan blink. He tried to speak, a bit baffled, but the fingers keeping his jaw closed tightened and he opted for letting Rex say his piece. The fact he wasn't dead yet gave him hope—weary, tired, suspicious hope, but hope all the same. Maybe…

"They're  _ twins _ ," said Rex, like the fact could have possibly escaped Obi-Wan's notice. "That's… that's more than batchmates. They're like… like  _ tube _ mates. They shared their mother's womb for  _ months _ . Can't you see? Look at them, look at their bond, damn you,  _ look _ ." 

He forced Obi-Wan to move his head in Echo's direction with a shaking hand. The young ARC trooper's eyes were blown wide, his lips pressed tight, but his arms were locked securely around Luke and Leia. 

The twins hadn't woken up despite the commotion, peacefully sharing their baby dreams. Obi-Wan didn't need to look to know that, with his eyes  _ or _ with the Force. Until the last moment before Luke's birth, he'd thought them one and the same. Prior to that, their mind had been too closely intertwined to register as separate entities, even to Master Yoda's senses.

Force-sensitive twins—or triplets or quadruplets, for that matter—had always been tricky to handle for the Order. They were always so Attached to each other, often long before their birth. Leia and Luke weren't any different.

"You could only made them stop crying by putting them in the same crib, for Force's sake," Rex reminded him in a tight voice, "and you want… No.  _ No _ . We won't let you.  _ I _ won't let you."

Obi-Wan could have responded with any kind of rejoinder. All the arguments Yoda had presented were still valid, the danger in keeping them together still very real. They both had strong presences in the Force, already, but together… they shone like twin stars, burning bright enough to overshadow everything around them. Hoping they wouldn't get noticed was foolish at best, suicidal at worst. 

What would they do, all of them, if the babies fell into Palpatine's hands? Leia and Luke would be killed or, worst, raised as Sith from infancy. What hope would there be left for the rest of the…Obi-Wan's train of thought suddenly came to a shocked halt when Rex  _ slapped him _ . 

He stared at his friend in blurry bewilderment, feeling the sting redden his cheek. It had been a rather weak slap, to be quite honest, but still… "What…"

"Stop thinking about the kriffing future and the kriffing Sith and the kriffing galaxy," growled Rex. "The future is fucked no matter what, the Sith will think the kids are dead, and the galaxy is  _ big _ . So damned big, I refuse to believe we can't find somewhere to lie low far away from the motherfucking Empire."

"I found a couple of likely locations," Echo intervened with his usual zeal. "Some of the Outer Rim Territories were never even part of the Republic, let alone the Empire, and there's some quite wild planets out there where no one would even think to…"

"Tatooine." 

"What?" 

"Urgh,  _ no _ , I wasn't talking about that cat box of a sand pit…"

Rex's and Echo's reactions clued Obi-Wan to the truth: the suggestion had really come from his own lips. What the fuck. "Tatooine," he repeated, surprised when he found his jaw free to move. Rex had let him go, thought he was still hovering menacingly close—far too close for comfort. 

"Why  _ Tatooine _ ?" Echo whined with a scowl. "My prosthetics don't like sand. They hate sand. With a passion I'm  _ sure _ an inanimate object shouldn't be able to express."

"Gene—," Rex swallowed the title, and closed his eyes. Morbidly fascinated, Obi-Wan saw a terrible expression of pain contort the clone's face, before it smoothed out again in seconds. He'd seen it, thought. He'd seen it and already knew he would never forget it. " _ Vader _ would never search for us there, that's for sure."

"Urgh, why?" asked Echo, obviously still thinking about grains of sand getting stuck in his mechanical legs and arm. 

"Because he hated it. Hated the sand," Rex clarified with a sudden gleam of nostalgic humor in his eyes, "and everything about it, I think. Never said much about the damn pit, but he grew up on it as a  _ slave _ . I mean, we kind of hate Kamino too, don't we?"

The connection was one Obi-Wan had made, the first time he'd seen the clones all arrayed before him, in neat ranks of perfect little toy soldiers proudly presented by their engineers. Flesh clankers, as he'd heard some of his troopers put it in bitter whispers when they thought he couldn't hear—or understand—them. He'd never talked about it with Anakin, however, hadn't wanted to bring back bad memories. 

Maybe he should have. Another regret, another maybe-could-have-been. So many things he should have said, so many things he should have done. They seemed innumerable.

He didn't want the act of separating Leia and Luke to join the list of his sins.

"That," he said, confirming Rex's assessment of the situation. "But also…my family lives there. At least, I think they still do."

"You have a  _ family _ ?" spluttered Rex, eyes round.

"Jedi can have families?" Echo asked, visibly just as surprised. "I thought you had to give them up, except in special cases like General Mundi where they need you to be a breeding stud. Or a breeding cow, I guess, in other cases."

He blushed a bit under Obi-Wan's stare—that was some pretty irreverent way of putting the whole thing, for sure. 

"I mean… That was kind of the point of taking them away?" Echo continued bravely. "The babies, I mean. Luke and Leia. They should…"

"…grow up with family," Rex completed with a gruff little smile. "You were Skywalker's elder brother, but you didn't seem all that keen on stepping up and doing your job, so I decided I would instead. Then Echo proposed to help me."

"He needs someone else to go through all the books about parenting baby humans and give him summaries. He's a lazy asshole like that," Echo explained with a long-suffering air, attracting an indignant glare from his brother. 

Ignoring that sudden insight into Anakin and Rex's sometimes surprisingly neat strategies was difficult, because it was fascinating and hilarious and sad all at once, but Obi-Wan had other cats to herd for the moment.

"Did you two realize you would be raising two of the most powerful Force-sensitives in the whole galaxy?"

Rex shrugged. "You were about to send Leia with  _ Senator Organa _ , to  _ Alderaan _ , which is a  _ Core world _ . Unless Organa is secretly a Jedi Master capable of teaching her to shield her thoughts and her powers better than  _ I _ could, I don't see what your point is."

Well. There wasn't much Obi-Wan could retort to that. Now that he really thought about it, that part of their plans ( _ Yoda's plans _ , said an insidious little voice,  _ to which you were too mired in your despair to contribute _ ) had been a bit wonky. Hiding one of the twins in plain sight and the other far away from  _ anyone's _ sight had its merits, but it was still a big risk. Yoda  and he had hoped that, once separated and incapable of reaching each other's minds, the twins' powers would go dormant until it was safe to wake them up again.

He tried explaining that reasoning to Echo and Rex, but abandoned when both their left eyebrows started to twitch. That was a sure sign of a clone trying very hard not to call bullshit on their interlocutor. He'd observed it on Cody's face often enough.

_ Gods _ . Cody.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to put that particular bit of pain away for the moment.  _ Fuck _ . 

"Hey."

He looked up at Rex, then took the hand offered to him and let himself be pulled up. 

"So, Tatooine?" Echo said with forced cheer.

Obi-Wan exchanged a long look with Rex, not sure what he was even saying with it, before looking at the babies. Leia had a frown on her little face, clenching her little fist on her brother's little blanket. Lightly trailing a finger down her smooth cheek, he was suddenly filled with a great, all-consuming love when her dreams immediately quieted down.

"Tatooine."

…

Echo was almost done entering their first hyperspace jump into the computers of the stolen royal yacht when they finally received a com signal from the station. Rex briefly looked at Obi-Wan, then accepted the communication while putting on his most forbidding face. Yoda's and Bail's busts materialized in the air, both of them wearing worried expressions. Bail's look of surprise, when he noticed Obi-Wan standing behind Rex's seat, would have been funny if it hadn't been accompanied by Yoda's dismayed  _ everything _ . 

Those beaten-dog ears had always managed to made even the most unrepentant padawans feel very guilty indeed. 

"Obi-Wan…" Bail's voice trailed off. "What… I thought…"

“Obi-Wan, what are you doing, do you think?” Yoda asked him, having apparently decided to ignore Rex's and Echo's parts in this for the moment.

"The right thing, I hope. We decided—" he valiantly ignored Rex's ugly snort "—that the twins shouldn't be separated. That they should be raised together. By family." 

There. He'd said it. Let them mull over that very un-Code-ly statement. Obi-Wan wasn't surprised to see approval mingled with dashed hope on Bail's face. While he was certainly saddened by the loss of a prospective daughter, he  _ had _ offered to take both babies. He understood.

Yoda's scrunched up expression didn't carry any such understanding—and even less approval. 

"Agreed, it was, that better for Skywalker's children it would be to be separated. Agreed, you did, that safer that way they would be," he reminded Obi-Wan.

"With all due respect,  _ sir _ ," Rex intervened in a tight voice, "safe doesn't mean happy. I want my brother and his wife's kids to be  _ happy _ . They'll be happier together than separated."

He said the last with such conviction that Obi-Wan's remaining doubts about his chosen course of actions were assuaged. Rex obviously knew what he was talking about—he had several millions siblings, after all, and had gotten on well with many of them. Obi-Wan, meanwhile, hadn't talked to his one blood brother in years, and Anakin… well. 

"Faulty, our interpretations of the Code may have been, but dangerous, I feel, it would be to allow unfettered, such a bond to remain," said Yoda, his face creasing in a deeper frown. 

"Your Code didn't do much to keep General Skywalker from Falling and taking all my brothers with him," intervened Rex with a scowl.

Echo winced alongside Obi-Wan.

"How do you propose to raise these children, then, Commander Rex?" Bail asked politely before Yoda could reply. 

Rex appeared taken aback for a moment and Obi-Wan caught himself hoping Echo would just switch on the hyperdrive so they could escape the conversation. But then the ARC trooper muttered something under his breath and his commander's expression cleared up. 

" _ Ba'jur, beskar'gam, ara'nov, aliit, Mando'a bal Oya'la kot. An vencuyan mhi _ ."

Education. Armor. Self-defense. Clan. Mando'a and the Force. All help us survive. 

Years later, Obi-Wan would still wonder if Yoda saw the same thing he did while Rex recited his newfangled version of the  _ Resol'nare _ , apparently adapted on-the-spot to their reality. A vision of a woman in a white armor inlaid with gold, compact and light on her feet like a great hunting cat, her characteristic t-visor hiding her face from curious eyes. She shone like a thousand burning stars, only matched by the young man standing at her side, his black military-like uniform contrasting with his pale hair and blue eyes.

The vision faded before Rex had even finished his recitation of the Six Actions, but it left Obi-Wan reeling. Echo shot him a concerned glance, looking at the way he gripped Rex's backrest, before decidedly turning back to the console.

"This was a fun conversation, sirs, but I'm afraid we must go now. Say your goodbyes."

Breathing deep, Obi-Wan shook himself up and locked eyes with Yoda. The old master still looked deeply unhappy, ears lowered and eyes dark with concern. 

"Master Yoda," he said while feeling a great peace descend upon him, "the Force is with us. May it be with you, too."

The strength of his sudden conviction must have been felt, because he had the pleasure of seeing his great-grand-master's expression lighten up a bit before the jump into hyperspace suddenly cut communication with the station.

"You saw something."

It wasn't a question. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last time, Obi-Wan wanted to know what, exactly, Anakin had seen fit to teach Rex. Remembering how the clone had used the Force to flatten him back on the station, which  _ should _ have been impossible, he resolved to get answers soon. Not now, thought.

"Yes," he said simply, not seeing the point in denying it.

"What did you see, sir?" Echo asked, curious

Obi-Wan took a moment before answering, to breath in his pain and his sadness, to contemplate the swirling blue of hyperspace, to feel the peaceful slumbers of his niece and nephew, the resolute determination of his companions.

Then he breathed out all of it, or tried to. It would probably take a long damn while before he came to any kind of acceptance about what had happened. But the time would come when he would be at peace again. He knew it, suddenly, with absolute certainty.

"I saw ignorance and knowledge, intertwined. Passion and serenity. Emotion and peace. Chaos and harmony. Death… and the Force.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Resol'nare_ : Mando'a for "The Six Actions".  
>  The original, mandalorian version of the Resoln'are reads as follow : _Ba'jur bal beskar'gam, ara'nov, aliit, Mando'a bal Mand'alor - an vencuyan mhi_ and could be translated to "Education and armor, self-defense, clan, our language and our leader - all help us survive."


	2. To Hold, To Feed, To Care For

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [Alyyks](http://archiveofourown.org/users/alexiel_neesan/pseuds/alyyks) for the beta and [Starofwinter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Starofwinter/pseuds/Starofwinter) for cheerleading me through this. Bouncing ideas on them is great fun !  
> Wandering midichlorians, alluded to in this chapter, are a concept of [Flamethrower](http://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/pseuds/flamethrower)

There were thousands of books about raising baby humans or near-humans; millions about raising baby sentients in general and  _ billions  _ about raising any kind of juvenile beings. Echo was in heaven for the first few files, then started noticing patterns he didn't like all that much, plus some he didn't like  _ at all _ , and started growing frustrated—and a little bit desperate.

That’s what he was there  _ for _ , after all. He hadn’t managed to clear Fives’ name, or prevent Order 66 to be carried out, but he would be damned if he didn’t find Rex the best fucking manual to help him raise the twins. 

"What is it,  _ vod'ika _ ?" Rex asked, coming into the den of the little cargo. 

It was cramped and badly designed and smelled like nappies and weeks-old graying cheese (Echo didn't want to know), but at least the babies were currently taking a nap with General Kenobi and not screaming their lungs out asking for Force-knew-what. That made the whole thing a bit more bearable and permitted him to concentrate on his reading so he could, at least, start learning what it was exactly they were piercing his ears  _ for _ .

He missed Senator Amidala's swanky, soundproofed yacht with a vague feeling of shame, but they'd had to abandon it a few planets ago: it was far too flashy for a pair of clone troopers and an ex-High General fleeing the Empire with two babies the Sith would have very much liked to get their filthy hands on. It would be no use blurring their tracks by flying all over the Outer Rims before getting to Tatooine if they landed on the damned hell pit in an chromy, shiny, posh-enough-to-make-even-the-Hutts-jealous ship… although the sandstorms probably would have scrapped away the flashy exterior before a month had passed.

Thinking about what fate awaited his prosthetics depressed him. Sand grains everywhere. Scratched paint job. Bleeding stumps. Fuck.

And like that wasn't enough, he would have to endure Threepio's theatrical moaning on top of his own—Force knew that droid was both an expert whiner and more ostentatious than ten Naboo chromed shuttles all by himself. 

Rex had been the one to insist about letting the droids come aboard, when they'd discovered them in the hangar after their confrontation with Kenobi in the corridor. In Echo's opinion, that decision defied all common sense. Artoo, he could understand: the little astromech was crafty as hell, which he'd proven by having the yacht already prepped and ready to go before they'd even gotten through the hangar's door back at the medical station. He also had an awesome sense of humor, if you understood binary—which Echo did. 

But  _ Threepio _ …

When asked, Rex had just answered with an unintelligible grumble where Echo had probably misunderstood the words "droid husbands", because that would have been weird. Though Artoo's attitude in relation to Threepio did have the accent of an exasperated husband corralling his prissy spouse…

Urgh. 

"Echo?"

He shivered and came back to the present. What an horrifying thought.

" _ Di'kutla _ ," he growled, throwing his datapad on the side table. "Useless, all of it."

"I'm sure it's not that bad." Rex smiled, a mocking glint in his eyes.

Echo was happy to see both the (smallish) smile and the (tentative) humor. His (ex?)commander had spent the last week wavering between crushing sadness and blithering anger with few in-betweens, and he seemed to have aged ten clone years in as many days. 

Echo could understand his bad mood. It was difficult to imagine how that kind of betrayal really felt; Fives hadn't forsaken everything they'd ever believed in, at least—to the contrary. But his closest brother was still gone, walking far away out of Echo's reach, like General Skywalker was now out of Rex's.

What a mess. What a horrifying, terrible mess. Knowing this hell had been carefully orchestrated and brought to them by a millenium-long Sith conspiracy didn't make it any better. At all.

He resolutely put those thoughts away. 

"Well, no. But how am I supposed to know what's right and what's wrong about what any of them say? I mean, we weren't―we―”

"We weren't raised the way I would want any kid to be raised, that's for sure." Rex grunted.

"That. We don't know anything about how babies and little kiddies are supposed to be cared for. Except, well, not like  _ they _ treated us."

He didn't specify who  _ they _ had been and didn't need to—the Kaminoans and the instructors, mandalorian and otherwise. Some had claimed to care about him and his siblings, but it hadn't kept them from letting the Kaminoans cull and terminate "bad" clones as they saw fit or raising them to be canon fodder. Let’s not even talk about Jango Fucking Fett. 

Echo had no lost love for that kind of hypocrisy and he knew Rex felt the same way. Fuck that bantha  _ poodoo _ , seriously.

"That's a starting point," Rex said with a sad turn to his mouth. "If you ever see me start treating Luke and Leia like the instructors did us, shoot me."

"That's not fucking likely," Echo tried to reassure him. Because it was not. Rex had never treated anyone like that, even disobedient soldiers once the war started. He certainly wasn't about to start acting like an asshole now, not with his own niece and nephew. 

"But they will need to know how to fight."

"Obviously."

Was that even in question? Kenobi could dream all he wanted about relative safety for the next twenty years, Echo knew better than to believe trouble wouldn't find the twins before that. They were General Skywalker's kids, after all. And Senator Amidala's, too, for that matter, who had seemed plenty capable of finding trouble on her own. If it wasn't Empire-levels of trouble, it would be wild beasts or desperate people fighting for food and money, or Hutts, or assholes neighbors or those Tusken tribes he'd read about once. 

They both contemplated that problem for a while.

"There was that zeltron dancer Fives and I knew on Coruscant…"

"Echo."

"They were very limber. Very fast on their feet. Could have strangled us with their tights, easily. Almost did, that one time I…"

" _ Echo _ ."

"Yes, well. Anyway, I saw them fight off a bunch of assholes, that one time, like a fucking Jedi, you wouldn't have believed it, jumping and twirling and everything. Very impressive. They said ‘it's easy to learn how to fight if you already know how to dance’, when I asked them about their moves. Isn't dance supposed to be fun, though? Like, rich parents always subscribe their kids to dance courses. Saw it on the Holonet." 

"You watch too much Holonet soaps, Echo, reality is not like that."

"And what would you know about reality, _Commander_ _Rex_?"

Rex scowled. "Don’t call me that."

Echo went to continue, but then thought better about it and stopped, feeling almost sick with guilt. Rex wasn't commander of anything anymore. They were  _ both _ running away from their responsibilities. Running away from the 501st, from their brothers stuck in hell, from their fallen general, running away from everything they'd failed to prevent. 

Deserters of the worst sort. They didn't deserve the use of their ranks.

Echo was also trying not to think too much about Kayden, the zeltron dancer he’d befriended while Fives was busy falling in love with them; he knew they had managed to escape Coruscant, but not much more than that. He just hoped they’d received the last message he’d sent them, with the codes to (some of) his and Fives’ hidden accounts, and a list of (some of) their hideouts. If not…

Well, it was no use thinking about that until he’d gotten Rex and Kenobi safely to Tatooine and had time to look for Kayden. One problem at a time, or he’d get nothing done at all.

"Fuck," Echo sighed, demoralized.

"Kriff," Rex agreed, somber again. 

What a mess, what an absolute mess, Echo thought again. For the first time, he was almost happy Fives wasn't there by his side. That his brother didn't need to live through that, that he was walking far away from that kind of painful failure.

"They said that we were going to be heroes," he then remembered aloud, bitter. "That we would serve Coruscant in glory, that our victories would be sung for ‘centuries to come’. That we were bred and shaped for heroics and honor. That it would be grand."

He swallowed.

"They lied." 

There was no honor in war―there could be in the way you went about fighting it, if you had no other good options, but war in itself wasn't honorable. That's what Echo had come to recognize, with time —and clandestine reads neither the instructors nor the GAR would have approved of. 

Rex said nothing, but he didn't need to.

"So, no lies," Echo insisted. 

"Yeah, no lies. Not even of omission," Rex added after a while. "As much truth as possible―or as we know of it."

Echo grunted. "Kenobi won't like it."

"Kenobi can eat my ass, for all I care."

Echo choked on nothing, amused. "You would like that, wouldn't you?" he asked, with a suggestive sneer Fives would have been proud off, even if neither of them had ever been able to decide if Kenobi was even interested in such things. 

He dodged Rex's fist, barely, then fell down on the floor sniggering. 

"Asshole."

Echo laughed harder, making Rex groan in dismay. Unintentional filthy puns were the best kind, the very best. Fives would have had a  _ blast _ with this one.

That sobered him right up.

…

The main problem with the books Echo had managed to download on their last stopover (on motherfucking Jakku, of all place—that had pretty much solidified his hatred of sand, but apparently did nothing to deter Kenobi from going to Tatooine) and the different theories defended by their authors, was that there didn't seem to be any middle ground to be found between draconian discipline and unrestrained freedom to be little shits. There probably existed books and theories that were more balanced, or so Echo hoped, but he apparently hadn't lucked out on that count.

Totalitarian discipline was right out, of fucking course, but the idea of letting young kiddos regulate themselves and hope for the best irked him almost as much. He deleted all the books from the datapad in a flare of indignation, then processed to sulk for hours after that. He'd never felt that betrayed by so many manuals before. Everything was terrible.

Rex spent those hours chortling every time he looked at him, echoed by Artoo's delighted beeping, and even Kenobi seemed to find his predicament somewhat funny. Force knew the man could use some cheer, so Echo refrained from snarling in retaliation.

Kenobi didn't seem to mind Rex and Echo jumping in the twins direction the moment they started crying to cuddle them into silence, nor did he shy away from handing out his share of hugs and attention, so draconian discipline probably wasn't his method of choice either. That was that, at least. 

(Echo knew, instinctively, that pampering to the babies’ every cry probably wasn't a good policy for the future, but he didn't care. For now, he was all for indulging them— and himself.)

On their next stop (the less was said about Ubaki, the better), Echo finally lucked out. Or, rather,  _ Artoo _ finally lucked out. What he found was such a small book, not very detailed or very popular despite its shortness, but it was to the point :  _ 7 Holy Commandments To Help You Not Fuck Your Kids Up _ . Curses in the title meant it would have retained Fives’ attention, had he been there, and thus were a plus. Rex agreed. Kenobi's expression went suspiciously blank, but Echo knew the bastard was laughing inside. He  _ knew _ it. 

Threepio's disgruntled grumbling about propriety went right over everyone's heads, and he retreated to the cockpit to "keep R2-D2 company". Nobody minded except Artoo. They could all hear his irritated beeping from the lounge. 

Looking at the table of contents confirmed Echo's hunch and reading the seven points aloud was an exercise in not sniggering too much to be understood. 

"’Firstly, you shall love the fuck out of them.’"

"Seems legit," Rex snorted, busy feeding Luke his bottle of warm milk. Kenobi was doing the same with Leia, but his shoulders were shaking suspiciously. 

(That was top-quality baby formula, Echo had made sure of that. Organic as fuck, no chemicals, very nutritious and adapted to baby human tummies. It’d cost him an arm and a half (ahah) on their last stopover, but it was worth it.)

(Kenobi hadn't yet asked where all the money was coming from.)

(Echo was thankful for the reprieve.)

"’Secondly, don't fucking shy away from telling them how much you fucking love them. Only pussies are afraid of saying ‘I love you’ to their loved ones, let alone their fucking kids.’ Oh. Alright, then. Rex, brother, you know I love you, don't you? Maybe I haven't said it enough."

Rex gave him the thumb, making Echo sniggers —until he saw Kenobi's face. It'd gone truly blank, this time. Expression empty, except for the pain he was trying to hide behind indifferent eyes. "Sir? You alright?"

Kenobi didn't answer, closing his eyes to take several deep breaths. Probably sensing something, Leia let her bottle go and started to cry. Echo dropped the datapad and jumped to take her from Kenobi's arms before she managed to upset him even more.

Keeping an eye on the poor man (Echo wasn't stupid, he knew regrets when he saw them and context was enough to know what it was all about), he cuddled Leia against his chest to try and calm her down. 

"Aww, man," Rex sighed, before standing up. He crossed to the sofa where Kenobi was busy falling apart and sat against him. He didn't have any free hand, they were both occupied holding and feeding Luke, but he was visibly trying to make do with closeness. 

The ratty, bolted-to-the-floor sofa was too small for Echo to join them, but he tapped Kenobi's left boot with his own. That would have to do.

"Fuck," said Kenobi after a while, eyes still misty. "Fuck. Fuck.  _ Fuck _ ."

"At the rate we're going, that's the first word they're gonna say," Echo predicted, trying not to chuckle too loud.

"You're right. You should switch to ‘kriff’ instead," Rex replied, frowning, like that didn’t mean the same fucking thing (ahah).

Kenobi sniggered, wiping his eyes, then looked up at Leia in Echo's arms. She'd calmed down and was back to furiously sucking her bottle. "Do you want me to take her back?"

"Do you need to hold her?" Echo asked, because that was the real question, wasn't it?

Kenobi visibly hesitated, his face full of longing, opening and closing his hands unconsciously. Rex rolled his eyes and gave him a shove with his elbow. "Don't be a pussy, sir."

Giggling, Echo passed Leia to Kenobi, who rolled his eyes before accepting her. "Thank you, Rex. Very mature of you."

"Kriff maturity."

" _ Indeed _ ."

Crisis passed, Echo went back to his datapad. Not for the first time, he was glad for military-grade electronics. Not a scratch on its casing or its screen.

"So, any more wise words from our sweary guide into child-raising?" Kenobi asked a few seconds later.

He held Leia more securely than strictly necessary, close against his chest, but who could fault him for that? Force knew that sometimes, holding one or both of the kids was all that kept Echo from sobbing his heart out thinking about Fives and everything that had gone up in flames. Figuratively and literally.

"'Thirdly,'" he started, "'fucking show them you love them. Words are important, but your actions are, too.'"

It seemed to give some peace to Kenobi and, satisfied, Echo continued on before he could get all teary again. 

"'Fourthly, always be as fucking honest as you can'. Apparently, 'the universe is a fucking dreadful place, so don't fucking paint it all pink and fluffy.' That seems a bit harsh."

"But true," Rex said.

"But harsh," Kenobi replied.

Rex shrugged. "Reality is harsh."

Echo jumped to the next bullet point before an argument could get started. Kenobi had been very good about letting Rex contradict him at every turns these last few days, but he would probably start pushing back soon enough, once he recovered himself a bit. Echo wanted everyone out of the way when that happened; in all likelihood, it was going to be very ugly. They were probably going to end up bruised, physically or emotionally.

Probably both.

"'Fifthly, don't make threats  _ or _ promises you know you can't or won't keep.'"

"Urgh. What do they mean by that?"

Echo jumped to the chapter in question, reading the intro diagonally to get the gist of it faster. "Mostly, don't promise them a pet for their birthday if you have no intention of getting them one, and don't threaten to take away their pocket credits if you won't do it for real. That makes you unreliable, and they'll stop trusting your word, and you, soon enough."

"Being consistent. First rule of good command," Rex agreed. "Legit. That apply to punishment, too."

"That was the next commandment, in fact," Echo said when he came back to the table of contents before jumping ahead again. "Like, 'Don't take away their fucking dessert because they stayed up too late playing holo games. Take away the fucking holo games.'"

It did seem all pretty logical and matter of course, laid out like that. Echo knew enough about command (and people) to know it was never that simple, though, even if it was a good starting point.

"'Seventhly, no child is the... exact fucking copy of another, even identical twins.' Err…'They're all different.'"

"Well that's true," Kenobi broke the awkward silence that followed. "We all shine differently. Each one of us."

"That's what General Skywalker said," Rex agreed softly, eyes far away. "He said true cloning was impossible, because we're all… unique. In the Force. He was right."

Echo knew there was  _ something _ , about Rex and the Force. He himself had never really felt it, thought he sometimes got useful bouts of prescience and generally knew when there was a Jedi in the room. Most of his siblings did. That  _ could _ be training, but… But. Echo’s foremost hypothesis about that matter was that Jango Fett hadn’t been a complete Null when it came to Force-sensitivity. The only hic was that he had trouble believing the Kaminoans wouldn’t have thought to test his  _ or  _ his clones’ midichlorian levels; they thought about everything else.

Whatever the explanation for the clones’ preternatural instincts when it came to their Jedi, Rex was on another level entirely. Fives had been the one to suspect it first, and then convinced Echo to look for the signs. Rex probably wasn't Jedi material ( _ yet _ , whispered Fives' voice in his mind,  _ and maybe never now that Skywalker is gone _ ), but he definitely wasn't… normal, for lack of a better term. He felt and knew things Echo didn't. He fought in impossible sync with Skywalker. He regularly sparred with Tano and occasionally won —moving almost too fast for human eyes. 

Rex was no Jedi, but he clearly knew something about the Force the rest of his siblings didn’t.

Kenobi suspected the same, too, if the way he looked at their companion as he helped Leia to burp was any indication. He probably was just as curious about it as Echo. Which was  _ very fucking curious _ .

Instead of asking thousands indiscreet questions (because he had  _ some _ self-control, thank you very much), Echo jumped to the seventh chapter to get details. "’They won't all fit in the same fucking mold’," he continued. "’Don't even fucking try. If your child can't breath in the mold society made for them, don't chop away at them to make them fit in. Break the mold’."

That left Kenobi blinking and Rex grinning like a mad fiend. "I kriffing love that author. Who are they?"

There wasn’t much in the bibliography section, except a name and the picture of a scowling, dark-skinned human with green eyes who  _ could _ have been female. Maybe. "Cinru Hodasa, apparently."

Kenobi's eyes suddenly went wide. 

"I know that name! I'm sure I know that name,” he then amended. “Show me?"

He exchanged Leia for the datapad, and squinted at the picture for a long moment.

"So?" Rex asked after a few minutes of silence.

"So impatient, Captain," Kenobi teased him distractedly. 

Echo didn't miss the longing who obscured his ex-commander's eyes for a second. Rex apparently missed the easy banter more than he was willing to let on.

"I think she…  _ they _ were a Mandalorian Jedi, couple of centuries ago," Kenobi finally said. "Didn't agree with lot of things after the Ruusan Reformation and ended up leaving the Order. One of the Twenty. Their name was Tiona Hodyn at the time, though. Changed it after they left. That's why I wasn't sure."

"What did they disagree with, exactly?" Rex asked, curious.

"Lots of things. The new interpretation of the Code. The new rules. The Senate. Everything, almost.”

Echo burned with the need to ask about "everything"—old and new interpretations of the Code, all the rules written in ink or tacitly understood by Jedi grown into the Temple, the best way to go around them, what was so wrong about Attachment (to love was to be attached, the way Echo saw things) and why was Skywalker having been bad at detaching himself the supposed reason for his Fall. 

What had this Mandalorian ex-Jedi done, after leaving the Order? Why had they written a book on the care and emotional feeding of children, of all fucking things?

There was a wondering glint in Kenobi's eyes, though, that told him the Jedi probably didn't have the answers to most of those questions… yet.

Maybe one day he (they) would. Maybe.

For the moment, Echo would content himself with reading the wise profanity of a long-gone author. None better than a Mandalorian (ex-)Jedi to tell them how to raise two baby Force-sensitives on the  _ Resol'nare _ , after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Ba'jur_ : Mando'a for "education, the raising and nurturing of children"


	3. Our Iron Skins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long silence, guys. Hope this chapter is to your liking!
> 
> Thanks to [StarOfWinter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Starofwinter/pseuds/Starofwinter) for betaing. All remaining typos or inconsistencies are my own.

Rex liked Hutts as much as the next brother, which was not at all. However, their current circumstances meant they were actually safer in Hutt Space than in most of the rest of the galaxy, outside of Wild Space and the Unknown Regions. The Hutts had never accepted Republic oversight and they weren’t about to accept the Empire’s interference either. How long the big slugs would get away with that attitude remained to be seen, but the new _ fucking Imperial Military _ (for Kriff’s sake) had other cats to herd right now, what with them hunting Jedi and rogue clones alike when they were not putting down revolts all across their territory.

(Rex tried not to think about any of it; when he inevitably did, late at night while looking blankly at hyperspace, it made him want to scream, or to vomit, or to go and kill himself an Emperor―possibly all of those at once, which would have been interesting. Then Leia’s or Luke’s baby dreams usually brushed against his mind and reminded him he still had people to lose. So he stayed put, didn’t reach for the controls, and continued to look at swirling stars, thinking of empty space and swallowing down his rage.)

So Hutt Space had its advantages. But it was still full of pits and Hollastin was definitely one of them. It was drab, ugly, its warehouses-infested surface looking like a reddish, grey-poxed rock. 

“Such beauty,” Kenobi drawled from his seat, looking at their destination. 

“Such grace,” Echo echoed (ah), tweaking the radio-controls while they waited for permission to land. Artoo beeped in agreement. 

Most musical stations in range of their tiny cargo ship only played utter trash, which did nothing to lighten Rex’s mood. While he’d never developed a true passion for music like some of his brothers, he still had a basic sense of taste and that sense had been steadily, indignantly rearing its head for half an hour now, trailing an headache in its wake. 

Kenobi, whose Jedi school curriculum had probably included shit like  _ scientific study of music  _ and  _ history of opera etiquette _ in between lightsaber lessons and meditation classes, wasn’t half so sanguine. “That is terrible. How is that even called music?” he asked to no one in particular.

“Echo, turn that thing off,” Rex finally yielded when his headache reached impairing levels of uncomfortableness. “All the stations are trash and it’s going to wake the babies.”

Echo probably saw right through his excuse, but he had the kindness to switch off the radio without comment. The silence that followed was slightly awkward and tense, but they were all getting used to that, and it had almost become its own kind of comfort. Almost.

Luckily, they didn’t have to wait very much longer before Control finally authorized them to land.  After Echo acknowledged reception and switched the comm off, he exchanged a jittery look with Rex, probably sharing his feeling of low-key dread. Kenobi, kindly, didn’t say a thing and let them deal with what was to come in their own time. 

They hadn’t come to Hollastin for anything fun or even routine, like a temporary refuge or a supply run, after all. 

They had come here to shed their skins and bury them.

…

Obi-Wan’s only outward reaction while the old “banker” updated Echo―or, rather,  _ Mr. Eya Yah _ ―on his finances was a slight rise of his currently blonde eyebrows. He knew the rest of his clean-shaved face let nothing out. Inside, however, he was reeling. 

He had suspected the existence of secret funds for a while: Echo had been the one to pay for their new ship after they’d hidden the royal yacht rather selling it (they had vague, guilty intentions of maybe-one-day clueing Naboo authorities on its whereabouts). Despite its derelict appearance, the little cargo’s engines ran smooth and fast. It hadn’t exactly been inexpensive. 

(And while Obi-Wan was far from an expert on the subject, he knew organic, allergens-free formula wasn’t the most inexpensive available option to feed the twins, either.)

The content of Echo’s (and Fives’, more than probably) accounts on Hollastin was still a bit staggering in the number of zeros it entailed, however. On most Outer Rim worlds, it would have been enough to keep the entirety of the 501st fed, clothed and housed in a style to which they never had the occasion to become accustomed. Obi-Wan’s dinner ration soured in his stomach at that realization, for several different reasons. 

He pushed his discomfort away to deal with later. He’d become quite the expert at doing so in the last several years. Obi-Wan was now an Avoidance Master, professional league, first class, gold medal, unrivaled. 

It took some time before the Honorable Mr. Bormo Aka’ra had finished bringing “Mr Yah” up to date on his investments and holdings (most of them, apparently, under  _ other  _ assumed identities), time during which Obi-Wan kept checking mentally on Rex and the twins, who had stayed behind at the docking bay to “guard the ship” with the droids. 

The twins appeared to be sleeping, thank the Force, and Rex to be alternating repeatedly between high-alertness and dejection. The exact tenor of his thoughts was hidden behind his shields, however, and Obi-Wan had no right to go and poke in. He could deduce most of it, anyway. Rex wasn’t exactly used to being left behind to wait, and his relief when Obi-Wan had offered to accompany Echo in his unpleasant task probably hadn’t sat right with him.

It wasn’t like the task in question sat exactly right with Obi-Wan either, but it still was much less personal for him, and thus less painful. In  _ theory _ .

“I understand you wish to make a physical deposit, sir?” Aka’ra’s words brought Obi-Wan’s attention back to the here and now. He shook himself a bit―he couldn’t afford to be distracted in their current circumstances. 

“Yes,” Echo answered, outwardly far more confident and aloof than Obi-Wan sensed him to be. He hefted one of the canvas military-like bags they’d brought with them. Aka’ra nodded with a knowing look. He was probably used to his clients hiding away weapons in his vaults. 

Echo and Rex probably would have been much less gloomy about their visit had the bags only contained weapons and supplies. 

Aka’ra left to fetch waterproof, fireproof, bombproof, climate-controlled long-term deposit boxes, which Echo had specifically asked for. Obi-Wan was left to look at the young trooper saying goodbye to his duraplast face―and to Rex’s, and Fives’, the last of which he’d apparently reclaimed from _somewhere_ , sometimes after they’d claimed him back from the Seps, probably before he launched his own private inquiry into the biochips. 

Echo briefly unzipped the bags, touching his helmet with his flesh hand before doing the same with Fives’. He didn’t say anything. Not aloud, at least. Force knew what prayers or promises or vows he may have been pronouncing in the privacy of his own mind. 

Echo’s face and attitude went back to stone-cold aloofness long before Aka’ra came back.

… 

Kenobi and Echo managed to cram the bags’ contents in the two large durasteel boxes, before sealing them with a variety of security measures, so personalized that Aka’ra himself stood no chance to get pass them if he ever decided to betray his famed policy of confidentiality. According to the many background checks Echo and Fives had run on him, his establishment  _ and  _ his network before doing business with him, such a breach of contract it was highly unlikely to happen. Better safe than sorry, though. 

Aka’ra called two assistants to take away the boxes and Echo watched them go with studied indifference. Inside, he felt like screaming. He hadn’t felt so naked, so alone and powerless, since his imprisonment and torture by the Seps. Only Kenobi’s presence kept him from recalling the assistants and taking everything back with them to the yacht.

Their armor were too distinctive, their 501st blue too famous, the silhouette it gave them now the symbol of a newly born Empire. It was far too risky to wear them, or even to keep them. Maybe one day… One day.

It was still so fucking weird, the very thought of going out into the world without armor.

After a moment of silence, Aka’ra cleared his throat. Echo raised a eyebrow in response to the wordless inquiry. 

“Your brother issued me with a... challenge, the last time he contacted me. While it saddens me to hear that he has left us,” he said with a perfectly sincere, utterly polite expression, “I am still proud, unreasonably so, to tell you that I succeeded in my task.”

Baffled, Echo couldn’t help blinking. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Aka’ra looked chagrined. “Of course, how remiss of me. But let me show you, instead. Sometimes, words are inadequate.”

Comming another assistant, the old banker asked for “Mr. Rayshea Yah’s special order” to be brought in. Then, looking back at Echo, he smiled with a (exceptionally polite) young boy’s gleeful pride. “I must say, Mr. Yah, that searching for these indeed proved to be quite the challenge, even more so than your brother had implied it would be. However, I think they are worth the efforts we went through finding them.”

Two new assistants entered the office with weathered durasteel boxes, very different in appearance from those Echo and Kenobi had stuffed full only moments earlier. They were about the same size, however, and looked both durable and secure despite their age. 

With a sign from Aka’ra, his assistants simultaneously opened the boxes. Kenobi cursed under his breath, momentarily losing his cool.

For a moment, Echo couldn’t speak at all, awed and incredulous. “How…”

Aka’ra’s eyes twinkled and he grinned. “They’re quite the beauties, aren’t they? And the true thing, I promise. I had armorers brought in to confirm.”

Echo didn't know what kind of armorers would accept to go to  _ Hollastin _ at a shadow banker’s urging, but then, money could accomplish a lot of things. In any case, he believed Aka’ra.  _ Beskar _ , or mandalorian iron, had a very distinct feel about it. Unmistakable for anything else, if you’d ever seen it before, and they all had, his siblings and him. Their trainers had been quite proud of their own ‘iron skins’.

The pieces of  _ beskar  _ plating carefully packed away in the boxes had been stripped of their paint job and most of their dents and scratches. The metal still had an old patina to it; these were not new armors, but they appeared ready to serve new wearers. 

Echo levelled his eyes at Aka’ra again. “How much?” He should have asked about their provenance, not wanting to wear someone else’s stolen armor, but he trusted Fives to have given specific instructions concerning acceptable sources for  _ beskar’gam _ . 

The banker named his price. It was mind-boggling―moons probably went cheaper―but Echo barely bargained before he told Aka’ra to subtract the amount from his main account.

Several hundreds of thousands of Cho-Mar poorer, but feeling a lot less naked and defenceless, Echo couldn't help but smile excitedly at Kenobi as they left. The Jedi, despite the aura of sadness and crushing grief still clinging to him like a dark cloud, smiled back. 

…

Rex took one look at the content of the boxes and had to sit down. “Holy kriff.  _ Shit _ . Are they really―?” He waved away Threepio’s attempts at correcting his language. The twins were in the communal berth with Kenobi, getting changed; he could hear them babbling from the lounge. Anyway, “kriff” was still better than “fuck”, in Rex’s book. 

“You know they are,” Echo replied.

Indeed, but it was still hard to believe. Taking one of the vambraces into his hands, Rex tested the give of the metal and found none. It was true  _ beskar  _ plating, strong and durable and calling to him in a way he hadn’t really expected. 

His siblings and he… the Cuy’val Dar had made sure they knew they weren’t  _ actual  _ Mandalorians, only cheap copies; rank soldiers, not true warriors. They were to wear Kaminoan-made plastoid armor, not _ beskar’gam _ .  _ Appropriate _ , as one of his most hated trainers had said. Rex had been no Null, to be claimed and adopted by Skirata into a real clan. Like most of his brothers, he’d always known he would belong to the Jedi, not to Mandalore. 

But… He’d recited the  _ Resol’nare _ to Senator Organa and General Yoda, hadn’t he? He’d adapted it to his own circumstances, trusting his instincts instead of his early training. 

Old  _ or  _ New Mandalore wanting nothing to do with him didn’t mean he couldn’t take from them what he wanted and leave the rest―like Cinru Hodasa had apparently done, centuries ago. Both a Mandalorian warrior and a Jedi, even after leaving the Order. Making their own way, their own rules. Raising happy, loved, capable children. These were life goals Rex could get behind. 

And apparently, he could do it wearing some of the best kind of armor in the galaxy. It was their first streak of luck in far too many weeks. 

“We’ll need to paint them,” Echo said while examining one of the helmets. 

“You should include a couple of scratches, a couple of dents,” Kenobi added from the berth.  “Some weathering. Or it’ll look suspiciously new.”

Mandalorians were insanely proud of the scars etched into their iron skins, that was true, as long as it didn’t endanger the integrity of their armors. Scars were proof you’d survived trials by fire. 

Artoo eeped excitedly. “He wants a new paint job, too,” Echo translated, before patting the astromech’s domed head with his prosthetic hand. 

“Well, let’s put paint on the list for the next supply run, then,” Rex said, forcing himself to put the vambrace back in the box. He looked at Echo, their unofficial navigator. “Where to next,  _ vod’ika _ ?” 

“Nar Shaddaa,” Echo answered distractedly, still investigating the pieces of his new armor. “Then Kovastin Station, then Tatooine.”

Tatooine. Their final destination. They’d taken so many detours to blur their tracks, changing their ship’s codes and shedding their skins to put new ones on, dyeing their hair and growing beards (or losing them, in Kenobi’s case), that the desert world had seemed like a distant goal until that moment.

“Ready?” Rex raised his head to look at Kenobi, who was now leaning against the doorframe separating the communal berth from the lounge. Blonde really was an odd look on him. He looked washed out―and so fucking young, without his customary beard. Like an old, weary warrior inhabiting a young, awkward body that didn’t really fit him.

It would take them a while to grow into their new skins, Rex thought. But they would. 

They didn’t have much of a choice, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Beskar'gam_ : Mando'a for "armor", litt. "iron skin"


	4. Not To Be Messed With

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to StarOfWinter for betaing this chapter (who was actually written MONTHS before the previous one, because sometimes inspiration is a bitch like that). All remaining typos and inconsistencies are my own.

Discovering that Kenobi's secret family had also apparently been Skywalker's secret family… well. Rex didn't even pretend to be surprised. Of course they were one and the same. Of fucking course. He'd already knew the Force liked its little jokes. That new "coincidence" just confirmed it was also a grade-A asshole. 

Again, no surprise.

Kenobi, though, had taken the revelation like a particularly dumb bantha, one who'd just been struck upon the head with a club and then dosed with whale tranquilizers. _Well, that's what happen when you don't_ talk _with your damned padawan and just assume he's as perfect a Jedi as you wish you could be yourself_ , Rex thought viciously, his anger renewed by this new development after having somewhat abated in the last few weeks, _and_ _let him think you wouldn't love him anymore if you knew all his truth. Stuff happen, and then you find yourself alone in the desert, lost in the storm, with only yourself to blame_. 

_ Yourself, and your younger brother's younger brother. Because he, too, wasn't fucking there, when and where  _ he should have been.

Kriff.

At least now, there were finally competent people beside him and Echo to watch over the twins and keep Kenobi from abandoning them on the side lane to better wallow in his guilt (no, Rex was in no mood to be fair right now,  _ fuck off _ ). That mean he could finally breathe. Breathe, and  _ scream _ .

He'd borrowed a speeder bike, waving away both Cliegg Lars' proposition to use the family's more comfortable landspeeder and Echo's offer to come with him—the Lars men seemed solid enough and Beru Whitesun's calm eyes shone with a reassuring amount of burnished steel, but he needed someone he  _ trusted  _ with Luke and Leia. Right now, Kenobi wasn't really it, Artoo didn't have arms capable of holding babies and Threepio had almost dropped Luke two days earlier. Just,  _ no _ . So Echo it had to be and his brother hadn't argued. Much.

Rex was officially going to explore an hundred kilometers-distant property who had, according to Lars Senior, been on sale forever. In truth, he couldn't care less about acreage and exposition and kriffing real estate value—he just wanted the space and the right to be as upset as he kriffing wanted without upsetting the babies in turn. Force knew none of this mess was  _ their _ fault, the poor bratlings.

Tatooine was full of sand. No surprise there.

Rex didn't have his general and Echo's burning hate of the stuff, but it was kinda boring to look at and consequently depressive as fuck. Why had he let himself be convinced to come here, again? It was no better than fucking Jakku.

It also kinda reminded him of Kamino, an impression he found baffling until he got to the edge of a cliff overlooking rolling dunes that stretched almost to the horizon. He'd often looked at the ocean's mighty waves from the rails of Tipoca City, losing himself in the monochromatic landscape of stormy skies and dark grey waters. From where he stood now, the desert resembled a sea of sand—probably just as traitorous and lethal as its watery equivalent.   

Like on Kamino, it was easy to feel alone in the world when standing above its most unwelcoming scenery—an impression Rex had often relished, eager to escape the constant and sometimes overwhelming company of his millions siblings. Now, though, he would have given everything to be back amongst his troopers, back standing in the multitude, back to how things had been Before—hellish, except not. Not really. Not compared to how they were at present. 

He'd come out there to scream, to rage and kick sand and let his pent up anger out where it couldn't hurt anyone, only to find out he didn't have the energy for such a display. He was so damned tired—he'd only averaged three to four hours of uninterrupted sleep each night since everything went to hell, plus occasional catnaps. Newborn babies needed to be fed and changed regularly, nightmares were a pain in the ass and anguished wonderings about their future weren't conductive to a good night sleep. Beside, being angry was draining.

Rex just couldn't seem to stop. Not sure he wanted to, either. He still needed to function and anger had always been able to keep him going when duty and habit ran out.   

Pressure had been steadily building behind his ears when his com beeped an hour or so into his exhausted contemplation. The incoming call from Echo was like a cold shower, making his heart beats at triple rate as he ran to his speeder. He accepted the communication with a barked "what" that seemed to startle his brother into silence for a moment. "Echo,  _ din'kartay _ !"

"Whoaaah,  _ vod _ , get down your damn eopie!" Echo answered immediately. "There's no rush, calm down." 

None of those were call phrases signaling danger with ears, so Rex took the time to breath once he'd reached the bike.

"Kriff."

"Err, sorry, didn't think you would panic like that." Echo's voice was understanding, thought, and Rex hated it. If he was losing it enough that his brother felt the need to coddle him…

"What then?" he asked after a second. 

"Leia is crying. Luke is crying. Kenobi is probably crying inside, too." Through the com, Rex heard a distant, indignant "hey" that almost made him smile. Almost. "We tried everything and Mr. Lars had Luke squared up for a while, but Leia is still upset so he's back to screaming his lungs out, too. Kenobi says they want you. I think he's right."

Rex was annoyed, sure, to have his much-needed alone time interrupted because that lot of incompetent morons weren't capable of calming two babies by themselves, but he was also somewhat reassured. Apparently, he  _ wasn't _ interchangeable for just any other caregiver.

"Alright, I'm on my way," he declared, bestriding the bike and kicking the engines on. "See you in twenty."

"Rogers," Echo acknowledged before Rex switched the com off.

…

They attacked him as he was crossing the canyon on his way back. Instinct made him swerve just in time to avoid a volley of motherfucking  _ slugs _ , and he looked up to see a dozen people half-hidden between the rocks. They wore goggles and head wraps, covered to their toes in sandy rags. Bandits… or, more probably, Tuskens. 

Rex didn't know much about Tusken raiders, except that his General had had a pronounced dislike for the lot of them savages—the rest of it, he'd learned from Lars Senior and Echo (there wasn't much information about Tatooine's different peoples available in written form, but his younger brother had probably found and read it all when he’d joined the 501st—he was curious and thorough that way). None of that intel was very positive and, for now, he didn't much care about hearing both sides of the story. 

He probably could have escaped them without too much trouble—he was a good enough flyer, and the bike wasn't half bad. But he had been feeling angry and powerless for weeks now, and  _ they  _ had attacked him first. He didn't have any doubts about his chances and their superior numbers didn't worry him at all; Rex knew his exact worth in a fight. Even thirty of those poor fuckers wouldn't have stood a chance. 

He was going to make them regret their audacity.

…

He came across Echo and Owen Lars thirty minutes later, halfway to the farm, and brought the bike to an hissing stop alongside the landspeeder. 

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Rex asked, annoyed.

Rather than answer, his brother replied with a question of his own. "What the hell happened to you?"

Rex shrugged, picking at the drying blood on the back of his hands before pointing at the collection of antique slugthrowers he'd tied to back of the speeder bike. "Met a dozen raiders. Taught them a lesson."

Echo smirked, before arguing, "There's only five guns."

"They didn't all have one," Rex answered without taking offense. He felt pretty good at the moment, shoulders almost free of tension for the first time in forever. A good, straightforward fight with minimum casualties (on his side) had always had this effect on him. "Anyway, I didn't pursue them once they turned their back and started to run."

"Why not?" Owen Lars asked, raising curious eyebrows.

"They're sentients, not clankers, and pitiful fighters on top of that; they aren't worth the stain shooting them in the back would have put on my soul," Rex responded easily. 

Lars seemed skeptical about the logistic behind that answer. Not actually Rex's problem.

"Don't try to understand," Echo told the young farmer. "Rex's got strange ideas, sometimes. His moral influences were too many and too diverse for him not to get confused and confusing."

" _ Copaani mirshmure'cye, vod’ika _ ?" Rex asked in his most pleasant voice.

Echo sneered. " _ K’ulyc, ne shukur gar gaan, _ vod."

…

They all got to hear more about the tensions between the Tuskens and the farmers of Tatooine later that night, around the supper prepared by Whitesun and Lars Senior. The grizzled farmer also told them about the day, almost four years ago, when Skywalker had come back to his birth planet with Senator Amidala to try and save his mother—without success.

"He came back looking like a dead man walking and we buried her," Lars said in a low voice, face drawn and eyes far away. "For a while, I thought he would just lay down in the sand, stay there until the suns turned him to dust. He looked broken. Without his girl there with him, I don't know that he would have gotten up again."

Kenobi's eyes were very wide and empty of everything but shock and sadness. Skywalker had probably never told him what had happened just before the Battle of Geonosis—maybe in fear that his master would judge him for his failure to rid himself of his “attachment” for his mother. He’d never told Rex, either, but then it had happened several months before Skywalker claimed the 501st. It hadn’t been his clone commander’s business the way it should have been his master’s.

"What happened to the Tuskens, those who took Mrs Skywalker?" Echo asked, with a kind of sober curiosity.

"He killed them all," Lars Junior said, looking at his glass of precious water. "I… overheard… him talking about it to the Senator. After Mom died in his arms… he killed them all."

Echo nodded, not surprised. Rex wasn't either; a bunch of barbarians kidnapped, tortured and killed your mother, you certainly didn't let them walk away alive. 

"Everyone?" Kenobi rasped, a complicated expression on his face. It looked painful. "Even the defenceless? The elderly and the non-combatants? The children? Did he kill them too?"

Junior lifted his head and stared back at him, an even stranger expression painted on his face. It looked like defiance and shame and resentment all rolled into one, a mess of complicated feelings. He didn't answer Kenobi's question, nor did Whitesun or Lars Senior, which was answer enough. 

Rex suddenly felt very cold, down to his bone, and glanced at Echo. His brother's face was drawn, his shoulders stiff with tension, and he was looking at Kenobi with wide eyes.

The Jedi was livid, lips pressed in a white line. "Even the children," he breathed, before burying his face in his shaking hands. 

"Even the children," he repeated, voice trembling. "Even the children. Even  _ then _ ."

In Echo's eyes, Rex could see the shadows of the same nightmare, the same memories of horror without name; little bodies strewn about the Temple's halls and corridors, in the Creche, in the dormitories, in the Council Chamber. Some of them had only been babies, barely a few months old, killed in their guardians' arms by his own siblings, his own soldiers, led by his own beloved brother. 

"Ben…" Cliegg Lars tried to say, visibly awkward and hesitant. "Obi-Wan… what… I mean… the Tuskens, they…"

"They're sentient beings," Kenobi hissed while lowering his hands, glaring at his father. "And children are  _ children _ . The species or nationality or culture or sins of their parents should never, ever, be used as an excuse to kill  _ children _ ."

"You know nothing about what they're like…" Owen tried to interrupt him, visibly incensed. "You don't know how they attack us constantly, they plunders and they kill and they burn farms and…"

Echo snorted before Kenobi could retort anything and Rex felt his own hackles rising. "He knows more about war and death and suffering that you ever will, farmer," he said in a warning tone that managed to shock everyone into silence. "Don't  _ ever _ fool yourself into thinking otherwise."

Feeling Kenobi's surprised eyes fixated on the side of his face, Rex did his best to ignore him. The bastard could be an oblivious fool and sentencious idiot, but damn if Rex was going to let anyone else ignorantly insult him to his face.

The rest of supper passed in silence.

...

Rex sat looking at his loot for a long time that night, alone in the semi-darkness of the garage. He'd woken up after barely two hours in bed and hadn't been able to go back to sleep. Rather than risk waking up the twins, he'd let them to Echo and Kenobi's sleeping ears and went to brood. Thinking about stained souls and twisted morals.

Alone.

In the dark.

He felt ridiculous.

Whitesun was the one to find him the next morning, rapping softly against the door before opening it. She looked at him, he looked back at her, and after a while she nodded slightly. Decisively.

"Do you know how to cook?"

He raised an eyebrow at the non-sequitur. "I know how to burn things so eating them can't kill me anymore." Didn't have much of a choice, in the field, when rations ran out; survival was paramount. Rex knew just enough about cooking to know  _ that  _ didn't really qualify as such.

Whitesun dredged up a smile. "Do you want to learn?"

Rex's other eyebrow joined the first. "I... don't know?" The thought had never crossed his mind before. "I mean... I never thought about it. Maybe?"

He didn't think Kenobi knew how to cook, either, and certainly not Echo. Unless he wanted to feed field rations to the twins once they were weaned...

Fuck no. "Can you teach me?"

"If  _ you _ teach  _ me _ how to shoot something else than a hunting rifle."

"Why?"

"I got the feeling that where you five will go, trouble will follow. The kind of trouble my granddad's old rifle won't be able to handle."

"Kriff, I hope not."

But he knew she was right; hadn’t he and Echo discussed just the likeness of such a thing a couple of weeks ago?

"Then you have a deal."

...

In less than a standard week, Whitesun learned to fire all of his blasters accurately enough for center mass shots, discovering herself an affinity for the DC-15S carbine while doing so.  She then took to the vibroblade with gleeful revenge. Rex couldn’t even fault her idiot, boring betrothed for his wide-eyed admiration: it  _ was  _ impressive. 

In the meantime and to his baffled embarrassment, his first forays into the art of cooking weren’t half as successful. Far from it, even, but he persevered past burned puree and undercooked lizardinne, finally managing to produce perfectly golden toasts and only-slightly-overdone eggs for breakfast two weeks after their arrival. And then Kenobi praised the  _ juice _ , of all things, the fucking bastard, like Rex had anything to do with it at all (Echo laughed his ass off for an hour after that, pointing at Rex’s no doubt disgruntled expression).

His knives skills, which he’d been so proud of, took longer to get transferred into the kitchen than he would have liked, but he soon learned to dice vegetables and bone lizards almost as fast as Whitesun.  _ Almost  _ being the key word, here.

But that was okay. She still had a bit of trouble dual-wielding his pistols.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Self-defence against starvation and food poisoning totally counts!
> 
> Mando'a :
> 
>  _Copaani mirshmure'cye, vod?_ You want a smack in the face, brother?
> 
>  _K’ulyc, ne shukur gar gaan, vod._ (Be) careful, don’t break your hand, brother. 
> 
> _Ara’nov_ : Self-defence. One of the six tenets of the _Resol’nare_.


	5. More Than Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to my dear Starofwinter for their endless cheerleading!  
> It may be a while before the next chapter, because I have to learn Mando'a *eyes it warily, pokes with a stick, runs in the opposite direction while screaming*

Tension in the Lars household had been running high since their arrival two weeks previous, and despite the unlikely friendship Rex had struck with Beru Whitesun over a shared love for sharp knives, Echo couldn’t wait for the estate they had just purchased to be ready to house them. Maybe Kenobi would get less emotionally awkward with his father and brother if he could get a little physical distance from them. One could hope. 

In any case, Echo probably wouldn’t be there to witness the progress (or lack thereof). He just hoped the situation wouldn’t have  _ regressed  _ when he came back. He was barely nine years old and had been raised in a giant lab; he wasn’t supposed to be the most emotionally mature person on the farm after Whitesun and  _ Artoo _ .

“What.” Rex said flatly, visibly furious, when Echo finally told him about his plans two days before he was due to leave.

Looking back, putting off the announcement of his departure for as long as possible had maybe not been the best strategy ever. Confronted with his brother’s fury and betrayed expression, Echo decided it needed a bit more explanation:

“You remember that Zeltron dancer I told you about a few weeks ago? Their name is Kayden. They’re not just a friend. They are―they were Fives’ sweetheart.” He swallowed. “His sweetheart and our lover.” 

Rex blinked, visibly thrown by those new pieces of information. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Last time I saw them, a couple of weeks after Anaxes…” Echo hesitated, before continuing. “They were pregnant. With Fives’ child.”

Kayden had already been on the wind when Echo and Rex had accompanied Kenobi to Coruscant after Utapau, or he would have insisted for them to come with them. But they were smart, crafty, a crack shot  _ and  _ an ex-smuggler beside; disappearing had probably been a piece of cake for them. At least, that was what Echo had kept repeating to himself during the weeks he’d spent making sure Kenobi and Rex arrived safely to Tatooine with the babies. Now, though, it was time to go see to it that his  _ other _ nibling grew up safe and happy, too. 

Also, he owed Kayden a foot rub; last time, he’d still been getting used to his prosthetics and hadn’t wanted to risk hurting them. They had been  _ quite  _ put out, complaining about their swollen ankles in a very pointed manner.

“So, there’s that, it’s my first priority.”

Rex nodded, understanding that kind of duty very well. Of course he did. Case in point: his entire current situation, holled up on Tatooine with a broken Jedi Master and his infant niece and nephew. “There’s something else, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Echo admitted. “Me and Fives, we have a lot of money put away. And lots of safe-houses. And escape plans. I only used a small fraction of them to get us there. It’s kind of a waste, don’t you think?”

Rex looked at him. Echo waited for a dozen questions about that money, and those plans, and those hiding places; his companions had both been entirely  _ too  _ good about not prying into his affairs until now. But Rex had apparently guessed some of it, because his next question wasn’t really one. “You’re going to help  _ vode _ and Jedi get away from the Empire, won’t you?”

Echo felt his face contort. “I’ll try. You heard Po Sai as well as I did, on Kamino. The shelf-life of activated biochips may vary from a brother to another. And I don’t know how many will even try to leave after it died instead of just…” 

He grimaced again, before pointing two fingers at his temple and making a firing motion. Rex flinched. “As for the Jedi… the survivors are probably well-hidden by now.”

Rex closed his eyes, breathing deeply. “I wish I could come with you and help you--”

Echo shook his head to interrupt him. “ _ Ne, vod _ .  _ Aliit solyc slanar _ . You have your children to take care off. Being a parent is your foremost duty, now.”

… 

Kenobi took the news better than Rex initially had, but still looked worried and guilty until Echo also reminded him of his familial responsibilities. Then he just looked perplexed, like he was still wondering how the hell he’d landed himself in a familial sort of situation. 

Seriously. Echo kind of sympathised with Rex’s barely concealed exasperation.

The General was still hidden somewhere inside their broken wreck of a Jedi Master, however, because he soon rallied to Echo’s plan and even contributed some useful bits of intel and suggestions. 

“You should get in contact with Janad. He was on Cyrkon last I heard from him. That was about eight months ago, when I sent Gregor to him, so they probably moved on, but… I’m sure you can track them down. I’ll give you our codes. Janad could help you. He’s very resourceful.”

“I thought Gregor was dead,” Echo said slowly, surprised. “And who’s Janad?” 

“Janad was before your time,” said Rex. He was eyeing Kenobi with a wondering, pinched expression. “He disappeared somewhere in the first year of the war. We all thought he was dead, or that he went AWOL.  _ Like Gregor _ .”

Kenobi snorted, disdainful. “Nothing so sinister. Honorable discharges, for the both of them.”

“There was no such thing,” Rex protested, bitter. “Not for us.”

“Not officially,” Echo agreed softly, now remembering a night soon after Anaxes where he’d been cornered by an sleep-deprived, fidgety General Skywalker and been told that ‘Obi-Wan’ could make him ‘disappear’, if things were ‘just too much’. Coupled with Kenobi’s story about Janad and Gregor, that memory raised the question of how many of his MIA, KIA or AWOL brothers had instead been ‘disappeared’ by their generals.

At the time, Echo had been too insulted by the implication that he could be a quitter to accept the offer, even with the constant pain and the sickened pity he’d seen in too many gazes. Now, he wished he’d at least said ‘thank you’ instead of the instinctive ‘fuck you’; luckily, his general had only dissolved into helpless giggles… once his eyes were done trying to fall out of their sockets with delighted shock at the unusual profanity.

“We tried to relocate disabled soldiers into noncom positions, but Janad… Janad wanted out. His exact words were ‘please, put me down’,” Kenobi recalled, looking haunted and upset, still. “So I called in a couple of favors, gave him money and reported him MIA.”

“And Gregor?” 

Kenobi sighed, shrugged. “We didn’t know what to do with him, after we recovered him from Abafar. He needed… quiet. Away. So I sent him to Janad―he never talked much.”

…

Of course, so many adult conversations conducted into such a mature manner took their toll on Rex, who then proceeded to continually snap at Kenobi for  _ nothing  _ the next day, right until the man gathered what remained of his pride and stormed off.

Seriously, Echo was so fucking done with the both of them. 

… 

"Brother, you're just being an asshole, now.” 

Rex felt himself scowl, ready to snap at Echo as well, but his brother interrupted him with raised hands. “ _ Udesii _ ! Seriously,  _ vod _ , you have to calm the fuck down. I love you, but it's gone on too long. He's just as heartbroken as you, you know it, and it's not actually all his fault  _ or  _ yours, and you know it too. Stop it. Now."

Echo had never talked to him like that. Rex sighed, knuckling his parched eyelids, slumping despite himself. He knew his brother was right.

It was just… Rex didn't know how to deal with his own heartbroken mess, not in the circumstances he was currently in. During the war, he'd always let his grief fuel his determination to see the enemy broken in turn, to lead better and more successfully, to continue fighting until the pain became numb enough to be ignored. 

There wasn't anything to fight like that here, because Rex kind of saw Kenobi's point about the Tuskens. Where else was he supposed to let his anger go, though? He couldn't keep bottling it all inside; it had a tendency to steam out at the worst possible moment. Case in point.

He was  _ so _ tired of being angry.

"Maybe you could ask him," Echo suggested, having visibly somewhat followed his train of thought. "How Jedi are supposed to let go of all that, I mean. Maybe it could help you. Maybe it could help him."

A Jedi lecture about detachment was the last thing Rex wanted to hear. "How do  _ you _ do it, Echo?"

His brother let out a little smile, bitter and sad. "I kick at sand and punch cardboard walls and hack rich bastards’ accounts to keep us in style. Those are my little victories. For now they're enough.” 

Then he sobered. “But Rex, I'm not as angry as you are. I don't feel the same betrayal. I didn't love Skywalker like the both of you did."

Rex grunted, not finding anything to say in reply to that.

"Don't get me wrong, I liked him a lot," Echo continued. "He was my general, and my chieftain, and my distant older brother, and I trusted him to lead me right. To fight for me like I was fighting for him. And he did. But I wasn't close to him. He wasn’t my best brother, I didn't know him in my heart, not like you did, not like Kenobi did. So…" 

He sighed. "Just do something, Rex. You miss being on good terms with him and, honestly, _I_ miss you two being friendly to each other. You were easier to live with then! If you won’t do it for both of you, or for me, then by the Stars, _do it_ _for the kids_.”

… 

To his surprise, Rex didn't have to follow Kenobi's tracks very far. He found him sitting on the edge of the closest canyon, observing Tatoo Two setting on the Wastes with a strange expression etched on his face. Tatoo One had already disappeared behind the horizon an hour earlier.

"I wasn't running away," Kenobi finally said after a moment.

Whatever he'd thought twenty minutes ago when he'd set out from the farm, Rex knew Kenobi wasn't lying. "Alright."

"I wasn't thinking about jumping, either."

Rex grunted. "If you say so."

"Really."

"Al _ right _ ."

Rex hovered for a while, feeling unsure and awkward and hating it, before approaching to join his―his  _ friend  _ at the edge of the world. That's when Kenobi finally looked at him, his eyes grey and sad and old in the reddish light. "Will you ever forgive me, Rex?"

Rex heaved a sigh, not really knowing what to say. He didn't know much at all, right now. "I guess, yeah. I'm sorry."

Kenobi continued to stare at him for a while, a pensive cast to his face, before going back to his previous admiration of Tatooine's wild lands. "Don't be. I'm not sure I ever will forgive myself, either."

That just made Rex feel worst, of course. He sighed again, closing his eyes to try and decide how the fuck he would respond to that. "Same here," he finally went with, giving up. "About forgiving myself, I mean."

"It wasn't your fault," Kenobi immediately said with a sudden frown.

"And maybe it's not yours, either," Rex retorted, feeling an ugly expression contort his face. "But I'm still fucking angry at both of us and  _ I don't know how to stop _ ."

"I know.” Kenobi’s hand clamped down on his forearm, squeezing tightly for a moment before releasing him. “I know”. 

… 

“Tell your friend, Kayden, that they are welcome here,” Kenobi said the next day as they waited for Lars Junior to emerge from the fresher. He was going to Mos Eisley to meet the family notary about something or another, and had offered Echo a lift to the spaceport.  

Rex simply nodded when Echo looked at him for confirmation. “Are you sure? You don’t know them.”

Kenobi emitted a caustic sound. “I suspect I do, in fact.”

Echo blinked. “You know a lot of bling-bling dancers, sir?”

The Jedi smirked. “Please don’t call them a ‘bling-bling’ anything to their face, Echo.”

He rolled his eyes. “If you know them, then you know they  _ love  _ identifying as a bling-bling dancer. And a pirate. And a smuggler. And I know  _ a lot _ of very unusual people, it’s true.” 

Knowing him, that was definitely an understatement. 

“I expect you two to have finished transforming the old farm into an inhabitable place before I come back,” Echo instructed them as severely as he knew how.

Rex rolled his eyes.

“I’m serious!” Echo insisted, scowling. “Kayden and the baby will need their own rooms, too!”

“Yes, Echo, we heard you the first hundred times you gave us our marching orders,” Kenobi finally replied. “Go in peace.”

“Not fucking likely,” Echo muttered under his breath. He was going to worry about it (and them) the whole fucking time he was away, just watch him.

“Let’s just hope your friend isn’t having twins, too,” Rex then mused aloud, the  _ bastard _ .

What an horrifying thought. Now Echo was definitely going to worry about that, too.

…

And then Echo left, leaving Obi-Wan alone with Rex and the twins. And his gruff, tired, estranged father. And his bitter, glowering brother. And his deceptively shy sister-in-law, whose low-key, constant exasperation at the lot of them was becoming less and less low-key as the days passed. 

It was a relief to move out, after they’d finally installed the new sensor arrays around the old run-down farm they’d managed to render habitable again. The place still looked shabby and bare, bearing the scars of speedy repairs, but the sensors they’d been waiting to arrive were top notch, the vaporators and the old generator were functional again, and the climate control system had been replaced; most of all, and as awful as it made him feel, Obi-Wan was about ready to go mad and needed to get away from the Larses  _ yesterday _ . 

That still left Leia, Luke, Artoo and Threepio as the only buffers between Rex and him, the desert as the only escape from their too-close quarters. To Obi-Wan’s surprise, however, no explosions followed their relocation. After a few days of relative peace, he mostly stopped waiting for it. Apparently, Rex’s last bitchy tantrum had been exactly that and their moment of mutual understanding on the canyon’s edge hadn’t been a fluke. Would wonders never cease. 

Between a couple of runs to Anchorage for supplies and tools, emergency maintenance on the farmstead equipment, patch jobs to be visited upon the new-old landspeeder and Rex’s obsession with constantly upgrading the security, they were both busy all day long and dead on their feet when night came. There was no time to fight, especially with the babies to occupy them always.

“When does the book say we can switch them on solid food, again?” Rex asked one night, two weeks after their move. He sounded both disgusted and exhausted. “Because Leia and that new formula? Not compatible.”

Obi-Wan grunted, knowing very well what Rex meant by that. They’d been living a screaming, smelly nightmare for two days running now. At least Luke had proved himself a bit more adaptable, sustenance-wise, and increasingly tolerant to his sister’s crying. Even he had his limits, of course, and the farm was (for now) very small. 

“Not before three months old, and it’s still not ideal,” he answered, trying to shield Luke’s perception with the Force and keep him calm. It was a mitigated success. He still wouldn’t switch place with Rex, who was on Leia-duty that night. As for the droids, they’d both escaped to the garage, the cowards. “Only very specific kinds of puree and cereals. And it will be an adaptation, too.”

“Kriff.”

Obi-Wan could only humm in agreement.

… 

The pattern repeated for the next few days, even after Rex had taken Leia to Mos Eisley with Beru to consult with a midwife she knew by way of a friend of a friend. The old woman had reportedly looked at him pityingly, told him it was ‘perfectly common’, that ‘nothing is wrong with your little girl’ and that it would ‘pass with time’. Waste of time and money, according to Rex, and Obi-Wan couldn’t disagree with that assessment. The Force had already told him Leia wasn’t unhealthy. Just… incredibly cranky, especially when night came around. 

Weirdly enough, mandalorian war chants were the only things that could calm her, and then only after a few hours of crying and screaming, when she was too tired to resist anymore. 

“There, your Bubu is back, now go to him and stop trying to make my eardrums explode, would you?” Obi-Wan said as Rex came back from his nightly patrol around their perimeter. 

“ _ Bubu _ ?” Rex repeated, making a face, while accepting the passation of the screaming baby.  “What the kriff, Kenobi.”

Obi-Wan shrugged. “ _ Buir _ is a bit much to expect as a first word, isn’t? Unless you and Echo are still angling for F-U-C-K, in which case I’ll have to use my power of veto to block the motion.”

Then he left the room before the poor man recovered from the shock. Getting the last word, for once, felt very sweet.

…

Kenobi really was a bastard, to drop a bomb on a brother like that and then disappear. What the shit. 

Rex was left with a screaming Leia, rocking her mechanically and humming a slow version of  _ Dha Werda Verda _ under his breath until she started to wind down from her Very High Emotional Turmoil. 

_ Buir _ . He never would have dared to take the title for himself, but now that it’d been bestowed upon him…

He missed Skywalker so fucking much. He would have made a great parent, just like the Senator. But they were neither of them there.  _ Rex  _ was. He’d promised to their memories that he would care for their children as his own. Maybe it was time to step up the rest of the way and make it undoubtedly real.

He wasn’t alone in this, though.

“And what are we going to call you, then?” He asked Kenobi after Leia had finally settled down in her crib, bathed by the shimmering light from her mobile. Called back by the blessed silence, Artoo had taken his usual place in the corner of the twins’ room, blinking softly and soothinly; a sentinel in the dark. Threepio’s fussing and whinning was worth putting up with, to have Artoo with them.

“Bibi? Wawa?” Rex proposed with a smirk.

Kenobi raised an unimpressed eyebrow, offering him a glass of the amber, potent alcohol his father had given them the last time they’d been by the Lars homestead. Rex accepted it, joining him at the center of their crampy living pit. Sitting against one of the vaporators, he only had to raise his head to see the galaxy arrayed over them like a blanket of stars.

“I’m sure Uncle Ben will do.”

“Ben?” Rex repeated, lowering his eyes to look at his friend. “So you’re going with your birth name?”

He didn’t know what to feel about Obi-Wan Kenobi becoming Ben Lars. It was almost too weird to contemplate. But then, so was the idea of being called  _ Bubu _ . 

And yet.

“That’s how my father has been introducing me in town,” Kenobi answered with a strange air. “It’s safer, it leads credence to our cover story, and… I don’t actually mind.”

A moment of silence followed this confession before he added, “Obi-Wan Kenobi is an heavy name to wear. An heavy identity. Especially since I’m not sure I ever liked him very much.”

Rex hissed through his teeth, less shocked than he would have liked to be at the revelation, but still sad… and angry. Not at Kenobi himself, for once, not really. At the universe, however? Definitely.

“Why just Uncle, though?” He asked to change the subject. “You could be Dad, or Papa. Or something. You’re taking care of them the same I am.”

Kenobi shrugged, frowning pensively. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.” 

Then he looked left at Rex, alarmed. “That’s  _ not  _ me shirking my familial duties, I swear!”

Rex snorted. “I know you’re not about to run for the dunes anymore, calm down. If Uncle Ben you want to be, then so be it. But--” he frowned menacingly “--you’re still on nappy duty your half of the time!”

...

Mandalorian adoption, just like their marriage ‘ceremony’, was not a complicated affair. It was a declaration of intent on the parent’s part, nothing else and certainly nothing less. 

“ _ Ni kyr'tayl gai sa'ad,  _ Leia.  _ Ni kyr’tayl gai sa’ad _ Luke,” Rex stated solemnly the next morning as Tatoo 2 slowly climbed the sky in its twin’s trail. Then he kissed both of their brows, which wasn’t part of the ceremony. Who cared. 

The rest of the galaxy wasn’t so terribly practical, however.

“That’s  _ it _ ?” Junior blurted, after the silence had stretched for a very long, expectant minute. Artoo beeped delightedly, audibly regaling in the young man’s confusion. 

Rex rolled his eyes. “Yes, that’s it. I’m their parent, now.” 

“Mandalorians tends to cut right through to the point,” Kenobi explained with a smirk. Smug bastard.

“What did you say?” Beru asked, curious. She had visibly been expecting something  _ more _ , too.

“‘I know your name as my child’,” Rex translated. 

“What about blood oaths?” Junior asked, frowning. “Documents?”

It was his father’s turn to roll his eyes. “They’re not Blood Carvers. And documents are meaningless to fugitives. They’ll probably forge far too many of them.”

Rex nodded, impressed. Lars Senior didn’t talk much, but when he did his comments were usually insightful. That was about the only times he even remotely looked like his eldest son; from the few old holopictures Rex had spotted across the homestead, Kenobi was the spitting image of his mother. Pale, red-haired, baby-faced… they even had the same  _ sassy eyebrow _ . 

“What about surnames? Family names?” 

Rex had thought about that already, of course. As much as he would have loved to bestow Naberrie-Skywalker on the twins, it would have been tempting faith in a truly unforgivable way. So his own name it would have to be, for the time being. When they got old enough to choose and assume the consequences of their choice…  then it would be different.

“Trakem,” he answered. “Luke and Leia Trakem.” 

After a moment of thinking, Kenobi’s eyes grew round and misty and Artoo beeped again, much more softly; they’d both translated it, then. Rex wasn’t surprised.

“What does it mean?” Beru asked.

Rex wasn’t the one to answer, this time. Neither was Threepio. “‘Walker of the Starfield’,” Kenobi breathed, a bit strangled. “Or, less literally, ‘Walker of the Sky’.”

… 

“I wish I could give them something of Naboo, too,” Rex revealed some time later, as they were coming back from the Lars homestead. “But I don’t know much about it beside stuff from their holodramas and I left the chromium pistols on Hollastin with my face. These probably aren’t the best examples of their whole culture, anyway,”

Obi-Wan hummed, thinking about it while he piloted. The babies were sleeping in their speederseats, thoroughly exhausted after spending the day being passed from arms to arms. Leia loved Obi-Wan’s father’s voice, rare as it was to hear it, and Cliegg was surprisingly willing to indulge her.

The conversation around lunch had actually flown fluidly enough, once Obi-Wan had started talking about his project of restoring the old hydroponics installations of their little farm. “Talking green”, as Beru had put it, was apparently the key to Owen’s distrustful heart. Had he known, Obi-Wan would have tried that approach sooner.

Now that he thought about it, the Naboo had been quite fond of their greenery, too. 

Rex frowned when Obi-Wan reminded him of that fact. “I know nothing about plants and flowers or things like that,” he said.

“There’s probably a book about it somewhere. Several thousands, probably.”

Smirking, Rex took his eyes off the desert for a moment. “You sound like Echo.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment,” Obi-Wan decided. There were far worst people to sound like. “And Threepio would probably know some things, too, don’t you Threepio?”

They both looked in the mirror at the uncharacteristic lack of answer. Usually, the protocole droid never missed an opportunity to boast about his knowledge of anything language- or ceremony-related. 

Rex smirked. “I think Artoo disactivated him.”

The astromech’s beeped reply was utterly unrepentant.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Nibling is a RL word! Did you know about it? I didn’t. Quoted from Wiktionary : “It was coined by linguist Samuel E. Martin in 1951 from niece/nephew by analogy with sibling.” I love it, so prepare to see it EVERYWHERE.
> 
> 2) Concerning Po Sai: No, I didn’t misspell _his_ first name ;)
> 
> 3) _Ne, vod. Aliit sol'yc buirkan_. Cobbled together Mando’a. I hope it does mean “No, brother. Family is the first priority/responsibility.” If not, I’m really sorry. If you’re a Mando’a scholar, please step forth!
> 
> 4) _Udesii!_ : Canon Mando’a for “Calm down!”
> 
> 5) _Buir_. Canon Mando’a for “parent”. Bubu, in that context, would be the mando, gender-neutral equivalent of “Papa” or “Mama”.
> 
> Comments give me life <3


	6. The Beat and Rhythm and Rhyme (Of Our Golden Hearts)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Omg. Omg. It's been so long. I'm so sorry! Please take this offering in expression of my deepest regrets. Lots of feels ahead, plus some emotional hurt/comfort.  
> I edited some things in the previous chapters, but nothing major. I also changed the tags; I've written some things in the future of this verse and Resol'nare is now very much Pre-relationship--nothing particularly shippy for now, though.
> 
> As always, thank you to Starofwinter for their endless cheerleading. This chapter wouldn't have been written if not for their support!

“What are you singing to them?”

Rex didn’t miss a beat despite Obi-Wan’s question, continuing to chant in a low, gravelly voice as Leia and Luke watched him with wide-eyed wonder. That, in itself, wasn’t a surprise; the babies loved to hear him sing―it still was the best way to calm the both of them down when they were feeling fussy. 

The words themselves, however… Obi-Wan (not Ben yet; shifting his perception of himself from a Jedi to a farmer was still very much an ongoing process) felt both his eyebrows rise further as Rex came back at the beginning of his―his  _ nursery rhyme _ .

_ Solus verd’ika _

_ Kotyc sha te shonar _

_ T’ad verd’ike _

_ Kotyc’shya sha te shonar _

_ Te shonar, te shonar _

 

_ Aru’ese shonar _

_ Solus aru’e _

_ Ta’raysh aru’ese _

_ Olan aru’ese _

_ Ta’raysholan aru’ese _

_ Solet’ures aru’ese _

 

_ Kama ba kama _

_ T’ad verd’ike _

 

_ Jii ta’raysholan aru’ese _

_ Jii olan aru’ese _

_ Jii ta’raysh aru’ese _

_ Jii solus aru’e _

_ Jii naasade aru’e _

 

_ T’ad solus verd’ike _

_ Ru’kotyc sha te shonar _

_ R’akaani te shonar _

_ Ru’rohaka te shonar _

 

_ T’ad solus verd’ike _

 

Rex’ voice gradually lowered even further, slowing on the last three lines before stopping entirely. Luke and Leia were still looking at him with big, round eyes; utterly silent and calm, hypnotized. Rex chuckled, before booping them both on the nose with one finger while flicking their mobile on with the other hand. Stars went alight on the walls, floor and ceiling, slowly rotating like a contained galaxy. Echo had bought it weeks ago, while they were still travelling towards Tatooine; hoping it would help the twins sleep.

It worked. More or less.  _ Sometimes _ .

That it did now was the important thing, and two minutes after Rex had stopped singing the little hellions’ eyes had shivered closed, the rhythm of their breathing slowing as their minds and bodies went to sleep. Obi-Wan then realized he was considerably calmer himself, despite his momentary shock at Rex’ choice of lullaby. At peace with himself and the universe for the first time in what seemed like an eternity.

Objectively speaking, Rex’s singing shouldn’t have been anything special. He sung the war chants from deep in his chest, low and rumbling… as was traditional for Mandalorians. He held the rhythm and beat of the chants without faltering… but again, any Mandalorian warriors could do the same. Yet, his voice seemed to have some kind of  _ power  _ and… 

Obi-Wan felt like an idiot. 

“Are you using the Force?” He blurted once the drapes separating the kids’ room from the short hallway had closed behind him and Rex.

Rex raised a defiant eyebrow, but the rest of his expression betrayed uncertainty and discomfort. “I don’t know. Maybe? I just really wanted them to fall asleep. I’m due for a nap, too.”

Once again, Obi-Wan almost blurted out the myriad questions he’d been pondering since the day he’d surprised Rex and Echo trying to smuggle the twins off the Poliss Massa’s station and been thrown down on the floor by what he was still quite sure had been a Force-enhanced shove.

Almost. In the end, he cowered out from all that conversation would entail. “Not wanting to keep you from your well-earned sleep, but where did you find that―that nursery rhyme?”

Obi-Wan already knew most Mandalorian war chants, plus some folk songs. He’d never heard that one, though, and had read nothing of the sort in Cinru Hodasa’s sweary guide into child-rearing.

Rex  _ blushed _ . “I didn’t find it. I… composed it.”

Obi-Wan blinked again, impressed. Was there nothing this man wasn’t good at once he put his mind to it? He’d taken up parenting like a pro from the get-go, whatever doubts he sometimes expressed about it. 

He was even learning to cook, of all things; by the time the twins would be of an age to appreciate such things, he was going to be  _ good  _ at it. What he whipped up most nights was already quite palatable. 

Part of Obi-Wan felt  _ envious  _ of the natural talent his co-parent apparently possessed for domesticity. Other parts of him were glad―glad!―Rex had the chance to discover those things about himself, notwithstanding the tragedies leading to that occasion. What a waste it would have been, for the parent in Rex to have never seen the day; to have died undiscovered and unused, buried deep in the mind of a clone soldier destined to slaughter and genocide since the tube. 

Incredible luck and overwhelming bad fortune, hand in hand; something to ponder when he next felt disposed toward philosophy.

“And what prompted such a rush of creativity, may I ask?”

Rex shrugged, his embarrassed blush already subsiding. “I was getting tired of re-arranging the chants they thought us into new configurations to try and not die of boredom. And one of the book mentioned that nursery rhymes were useful to teach the basics of language to young kids. Numbers, colors, basic vocabulary; all that.”

Obi-Wan still remembered some of the many, many rhymes he’d been taught in the Creche during his own infancy and childhood. They’d just been… considerably less martial-oriented than Rex’ composition.

He decided not to pass that last remark aloud. The rhyme had been neither better nor worse than the traditional chants, after all. Just unexpected.  _ If you wanted the kids to be raised as perfect little Jedi, you should have thought about kidnapping them yourself, _ he thought wryly in the privacy of his own mind.  _ Warrior themes are par for the course when raising miniature Mandos _ .

He wouldn’t have survived parenthood on his own anyway. There was no use pondering might-have-beens. Luke and Leia  _ Trakem  _ would be raised on Rex’ version of the Six Actions, and that was that. 

“I’ll try to dredge up some rhymes for Basic,” he finally said. “I’ll ask Artoo and Threepio to help me. Maybe High Galactic, too. And Huttese. Though four languages may be a bit much for  _ infants _ .”

Rex’ shoulders relaxed visibly. Had he really been worried Obi-Wan would want to fight him on it? “Maybe a bit. They’ll need both Basic and Huttese to live here, that’s for sure. That―maybe these are a bit more important than Mando’a.”

For reasons unclear, that proposition didn’t sit well with Obi-Wan. “Let’s drop High Galactic for now, alright? Nobody speak it as a first language, anyway. I’ll check the books to see what they have to say about children learning multiple languages at a time. Maybe there’s a method. Or maybe that’s just not advisable.”

Rex sighed, before nodding. “You and the droids do that. Me, I’m taking a nap.”

He looked knackered, shoulders and head bowed as he disappeared behind the curtain of his own room. He’d been helping Obi-Wan and Artoo set up some of the new hydroponics components in their newly refurbished underground greenhouse, all the while keeping an eye on the kids in their makeshift playpen. Both were tiring work, especially after a morning spent in Anchorage bargaining for that same equipment. He’d come back with all the right components and tools, but he’d looked―preoccupied, for lack of a better word. Obi-Wan had let him be, trusting his housemate to tell him about any serious problem requiring both their attention. Maybe Threepio had just grated on his nerves the whole time they were shopping for parts. 

That trust was a legacy from the years spent fighting and commanding conjointly; despite betrayals―willing or not―by other colleagues, Obi-Wan refused to question the understanding he still shared with Rex. They had more than enough issues between the two of them already; they needed trust concerns on his part like they needed the plague. Which was to say, not at all. 

_ Colleagues _ . Such a cold, detached and utterly inadequate word to describe his relationships with both Anakin and Cody. 

There was certainly no way he could nap peacefully after bringing  _ that  _ up, even in his own head. Better to start his research on cognitive development in infancy right away. 

And maybe prepare something really simple for the evening meal. Obi-Wan could just about handle salads; throwing a bunch of vegetables from the Larses’ farm together with some sweet vinegar and oil didn’t require any particular talent, and it would stop Rex from embarking in anything too complicated after he woke up.

The day had dredged up more than enough complex questions already. 

…

Not for the first time in the last few weeks, Rex wished Echo had come back already. He and Kenobi did well enough on their own, both with the farm and the kids; surprisingly well, all considering. The Larses had helped them a lot with both, of course. Senior knew his way around a baby and Junior around hydroponics. As for Beru, she seemed to be an endless source of knowledge on all things Tatooine, including its various inhabitants and all their differing (or common) customs. As they needed not to attract more attention than strictly necessary, this was tremendously useful. The fastest they could merge in the local landscape, the safer they would be. 

Threepio was still an itch in the backside most of the time, but he was useful to keep an eye on the kids when they were in different rooms; as for Artoo, he’d thrown himself wholeheartedly in maintaining their mechanical and electrical equipment―he’d even had a couple ideas about maximizing the productivity of their vaporators that had made the Larses’ and Kenobi’s eyes gleam with interest. But if Junior thought  _ for one second _ he could snatch Artoo away to his own farm, he was delusional. 

Still, until Echo had left Rex had never spent more than a few  _ hours  _ without one of his siblings by his side. The continued absence was rattling. However deeply Rex loved his kids and cared for Kenobi (and for the Larses, too, more and more each day), he still felt more lonely than he had ever been. He found himself speaking Mando’a increasingly frequently, and while both Kenobi and Threepio could and would answer him in the same language without hesitation, it wasn’t the same. The kids weren’t yet at the stage where they could talk back at him, and wouldn’t be for a while. As for the Larses, they didn’t speak a word of Mando’a―and why would they have? 

If anything, talking with them during the frequent “familial visits” back and forth did wonder for his Huttese. It wasn’t difficult to pick up, far from it; Rex had been raised bilingual, and engineered to learn easily and quickly. He would probably be fluent before another month had passed. 

He could already bargain with the locals in Anchorage, who didn’t always speak a very standard Basic. Even if he still attracted amused or uncomprehending stares sometimes, Threepio could cover the rest of his bases on that front; he was surprisingly comfortable with the whole market  and haggling experience. 

Only surprising if you forgot he’d been put together in the slave quarters of Mos Espa and lived there for a while, of course.

_ Bargaining _ , Beru had said, _ is one of the most common cultural fibers of Tatooine _ ; Rex knew he had to learn it quickly if he didn’t want to be short changed or, worst, be seen as a rude outsider.

So he was rarely alone and could speak Mando’a as much as he wanted, but still he missed the presence of his brothers; at this point, any brother would have done the job. There were things about Rex only one of his siblings could understand. 

The more he read about cultures, about traditions, the more he realized how far the GAR clone troopers’ customs had strayed from traditional Mandalorian values. After their very special circumstances of upbringing, he thought the biggest differencing influence had been the Jedi’s. Baring a few exceptions (kriffing Krell came to mind immediately), the Jedi had  _ pushed  _ their troops to individualize; they’d called them by their names (and when they didn’t have any, named them themselves); they’d waved a seriously stunning amount of the GAR rules regarding uniforms and personal maintenance to allow them to express themselves within the limit of safety regulations; they’d encouraged their questions and their curiosity about the galaxy outside of military matters; they’d insisted on respecting the locals as much as possible wherever they went, including on worlds they’d had to retake against their population’s wishes; and Rex remembered enough about the start of the war to see how much some Jedi had changed themselves, how they’d adopted the very colors and mascots and inside jokes they’d encouraged their troops to pick up.

The Kaminoans may have brought the clones to life, and the trainers may have given them a sense of unity along with all the other skills necessary to face enemy fire; but it was the Jedi who first had truly allowed them their individuality, their personal identities. 

Who’d put the finishing touches on them, in some strange and roundabout way. 

Rex tried not to think about it for too long, too often, because he always ended up choking on an ocean of grief and rage to rival Kamino’s great, furious expanses of water. That couldn’t be healthy. 

… 

“The content of the war chants and the rhymes makes you uncomfortable,” Rex blurted out before he could stop himself. 

Why was he even bringing it up? While they were putting the finishing touches on the hydroponic installations, no less. They definitely didn’t need something to fight about while manipulating equipment who’d cost more than the farm itself. Their bickering about the way Rex apparently spiced their meals  _ with far too much enthusiasm, that last casserole burned away the outer layer of skin on my tongue _ had been a relatively safe subject; why couldn’t he have stuck to it?

Except he’d been wondering about Kenobi’s thoughts on the matter for a while, and responsible adults were supposed to talk things out instead of bottling them up. That was something on which both Beru and their Sweary Guide Into Parenthood agreed vehemently. 

Kenobi’s raised eyebrow made his doubts about the choice of subject patently clear, too. “Yes, they do, but you’ll note I haven’t said anything about it.”

“Why?” Stars, why was he even insisting? This was masochism, that’s what it was.

“My qualms are for me to deal with, Rex,” Kenobi replied, now sounding a bit annoyed. “You don’t need to be burdened with them.”

Rex couldn’t help an eye-roll. “You’re raising these children with me, yes? I can’t―can’t just make all the decisions without consulting you. Especially if those decisions go contrary to some of your ‘fundamental principles’.” 

He took a breath, frustrated, trying to explain himself a bit better. “It’s supposed to be a team effort.”

Kenobi’s frown had deepened which each word, but at least he looked more confused than irritated now.

(Rex was surprised by how much he didn’t want to  _ fight _ ; what he wanted was a ‘strategic meeting carried in an orderly and efficient manner’, to quote his favorite fellow commander.) 

( _ Damn it, Cody. You would have been so much better at handling your General that I could ever be. _ ) 

“You didn’t look like you wanted my input all that much, before,” Kenobi said cautiously. “For the big decisions. I was trying to respect that.”

“Well, I was angry with you,” Rex had to admit, “and not being very rational or fair about it.”

Kenobi smirked slightly, an expression that had started to make its comeback lately―often when arguing about vegetables with his brother (seriously, while Rex was glad to see it more and more often, he really didn’t want to know what that was all about.)

“While I’m glad you’re admitting that, I want to reiterate that I wasn’t begrudging you your―your parental authority,” Kenobi reminded him. 

Rex sighed explosively. “I  _ know _ . Would you just―” From the corner of his eyes, he spotted Artoo sliding out of the room as silently as droidely possible. Smart little heap of scrap parts.

He knuckled his eyes, before sighing again and continuing, “I was angry, and afraid you would want to―to raise them to be perfect little Jedi Knights instead of just raising them like children. So instead I went all ‘Mandalorian this and Mandalorian that’. A bit hypocritical, no? Especially since I don’t feel particularly Mando most of the time. It’s ridiculous.”

Kenobi looked cautiously curious. “You don’t?”

Rex hesitated, before trying to resume all the things he’d pondered about for a while now; “My  _ vode _ and me… We weren’t just made by Kaminoans engineers and Mando trainers. The Jedi… you made us, too.”

Trying to explain something he’d never put into words before was  _ excruciating _ . Kenobi’s wide-eyed stare made it even worse. Still, Rex plodded on: “We weren’t part of the Jedi Order, but we belonged to it and―”

“Rex.” Kenobi had jumped up from his crouch, abandoning his tools with a clatter. “You  _ were _ .  _ You were a part of the Order _ . Of course you were. All of you, to the last embryos stored in Kaminoan labs.”

Rex felt as if his breath had been punched out of him. His lungs struggled to draw in air. “Oh.”

“By all the stars in the sky,” Kenobi swore low and  _ vicious _ , covering his face with his hands. He rubbed hard over his eyes and mouth. “We made such a horrible mess of everything, I know. You must understand―”

He barely hesitated before going ahead, shattering the foundations of Rex’s world as he went “―we didn’t know about you,  _ at all _ , before I followed Jango Fett’s tracks to Kamino just before Geonosis.”

“ _ what _ ”

“Your existence was a complete surprise to everyone on the Council,” Kenobi continued, “let alone the rest of the Jedi. I had no fucking idea what we were going to do with _millions_ of individuals whose engineers had tried to mold into perfect copies of each others. Whose sole purpose was supposed to be war. Who had apparently been created at the behest of _one of our own_. Don’t get me wrong, you’re all miracles, but the way you were treated and raised… Rex, that was an abomination that went against the very foundations of our Order.”

His next breath shook and faltered, almost like a sob. “We had no idea what to do with you all. None.”

“Then Geonosis happened,” Rex said, his voice flat even to his own ears.

“Then Geonosis happened, hundreds of Jedi died and suddenly we were at war, leading you to slaughter. This  _ also  _ went against each one of our principles, and still we didn’t protest it. We knew this war was wrong, and yet we didn’t question it. We knew there was something highly suspicious about the whole ‘Master Sifo-Dyas ordered an army after experiencing visions and then  _ died’ _ , and yet we didn’t spare the ressources to really investigate it. 

“Damn it, Rex, I  _ knew  _ you had chips implanted in your brains, and I was horrified at the whole idea of aggression-curbing biochips,  _ we all were _ , and yet we didn’t do anything about it! We’d been serving the Republic and the Senate for so long, we didn’t even think about saying ‘fuck no’ to all that nerfshit before it was too late.”

Rex had never seen Kenobi like this, even in the slave pits of Zygerria; even on Utapau after his own troopers had shot him down from a cliff; even when they’d walked into the devastated temple on Coruscant; even after he’d fought his ex-apprentice on Mustafar and left him to burn. Kenobi didn’t just look heartbroken; he looked  _ undone _ , and definitely not in the good sense of the term. Unraveled. Unfettered. Shattered in a trillion pieces.

“So you understand, Rex,” Kenobi took up again after a while, “I do not trust myself to make the right decisions anymore. I do not trust the tenets of my order. I do not trust our Code. We failed each other, we failed you, we failed the galaxy and  _ we failed Anakin _ .”

The last words broke out of him like venom, like bile, like it was burning him right along with everything he’d ever believed in. Afraid Kenobi would melt right down in a puddle of self-hatred and self-doubt, never to come back up again, Rex reached out and crushed him in his arms. Maybe if they held each other tight enough, their bits and pieces wouldn’t scatter in the wind. Maybe there would be enough left to built themselves back up.

Maybe.

…

The things with infants was that they didn’t leave you much time to wallow in anguish and self-pity. When they needed attention and care, they needed it  _ now _ , and beware the ears who wouldn’t answer promptly and diligently to their call. 

It could be tiring beyond belief, but it was also grounding. Luke and Leia were two very important, very precious incitatives to get his shit together and not crumble under the weight of his regrets and his remorses. None of it was the kids’ fault, and they deserved the best of care. They deserved love and happiness, and plenty of it, and Obi-Wan was determined to give it all to them. At whatever costs.

He was self-aware enough to realize, with as much wonder as terror, that he’d become irremediably attached to them. That this attachment ran deeper than any bond he’d ever formed with anyone else. It had seeped into his veins, dug into his bones, settled in his heart and soul and marrow. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it had changed him down to his genetic code, however unscientific that thought was. Obi-Wan knew he wouldn’t come back from that change.

More than that, he didn’t want to. Not really. While Rex had been the one to pull him out of his misery and force him into action, into decision, Luke and Leia had been the ones to anchor him. Some days, he felt like they were the only things keeping him from unraveling into shreds and being swept up by the desert winds. He was tethered to them. He would be his whole life long. 

In another world, Obi-Wan knew he would have gone into the desert alone. He could see it very clearly, that possibility who’d almost come to pass. Loneliness and madness for long years, only time and meditation to soothe his wounds. He would have come back into Luke’s life when he was an adult, old enough to fight. Old enough to become the weapon by which the Jedi’s revenge would be exacted. 

In another world, that’s what he would have become.

But not in this one. 

“They really like that puree,” Rex remarked a bit later, as they were feeding the kids. He still sounded wrecked, and Obi-Wan risked an hand on his shoulder, squeezing softly. Rex’s hug had held him together long enough for the kids to wake up from their nap and demand attention at the top of their littles lungs. 

Obi-Wan had never really allowed himself to become very tactile, even with Anakin or with Satine (who inspired very different types of feelings in him, but probably could have both beneficiated from a little more overt affection on his part). He’d seen how such a simple thing as a pat on the back or the shoulder could ground his soldiers, of course, and never hesitated to give them that meager comfort. 

Somewhat, here, it was different. He and Rex had stepped out of their old boundaries and would need to learn new ones. If rib-crushing hugs were part of it, though, Obi-Wan didn’t see why shoulder squeezes wouldn’t be.

Rex didn’t shrug him off; to the contrary, he leaned into it a bit. Obi-Wan relaxed, and kept his hand in place. “That they do. The fruits came from the Darklighter’s farm, don’t they?”

“Yep,” Rex confirmed. “The recipe, too. Baby food or not, _ I _ like it too. It’s fresh and sweet and just a little bit tangy.  _ Jatisyc _ .”

Feeling his housemate had now recovered most of his equilibrium, Obi-Wan let his shoulder go to grab their own plates. Instant bread, sweet and sour jam, and fruits; neither of them felt like putting more effort into it than that. 

“I never told you about what I researched the other day, did I? About language learning and cognitive development.”

“Nope,” Rex said, dipping a piece of bread in the jam with one hand while feeding little spoonfuls of fruit puree to the twins with the other. 

Obi-Wan could only admire his coordination.

They’d only just started Leia and Luke on solid food (for a given definition of “solid”), gradually getting them used to pureed things between formula bottles. For now, they tasted everything with enthusiasm, but Obi-Wan knew better than to trust in that attitude to remain for very much longer.

Also, the baby books had been right; starting the transition from formula to semi-solid food  _ had  _ proven to be an adaption in the digestion department, too. The days of smelly nappies still stretched far before them. 

“Well, there are a lot of theories,” Obi-Wan started, “but those that made the more sense to me in terms of my own experiences and observations are that any child has a limited number of words they can learn at a time. These numbers vary from child to child, species to species, and one development stage to another. However, an average human child can usually handle learning two languages at a time; sometimes three. The prefered method is to create ‘categories’ for each language, to help the kids separate one from the other. Often, it either means that the caretakers speak one language―their own―while exposing their charges to educative entertainment in another; or that each guardian express themselves almost exclusively in one language, while the other use a second one, and so on and so on.

“What’s more, it’s been proven that children who learned to speak two or more languages in their early childhood found it easier to learn more later on.”

Rex hummed, finishing to chew his bite before he answered. “So if I continue to speak Mando’a to them, and you speak Basic, there shouldn’t be any problem? What about Huttese?”

“They’ll learn it from anyone else soon enough; my father and my brother are fluent, and Beru learnt it before Basic. You’re practically at that point yourself. I know for a fact Echo memorized at least four alphabets, several coding languages, and more spoken dialects that should be possible for one human to remember. Threepio knows―”

“Six millions forms of communication, Master Ben,” the droid volunteered from where he’d been sitting in the den, criticising Artoo’s oiling techniques.

(That sounded far dirtier that it should have. How unsettling.)

“―many languages, thank you Threepio. They’ll get by fine, Rex.”

Some tension must have remained from their last conversation about the same subject, because Rex’s shoulders momentarily slumped a bit. He looked relieved. Obi-Wan regretted not having brought it up again sooner. “Plus,” he then added, “infants and toddlers can pick up basic sign language much sooner than they can learn to talk. It can help them communicate their needs in, err, less strident fashion; thus sparing their parents from a whole lot of frustration.”

Rex’s eyes had become positively starry. “That’s… a good idea. Really, really good idea. I only know some Standardized Galactic Sign Language for Fingered Humanoids, though. And military hand signs.”

“Well, since they’re both ‘fingered humanoids’, I think that would be appropriate.” Obi-Wan couldn’t help mocking him a bit. 

Rex scowled at the same time his lips twitched, trying to hide a smile. “What I mean is that I don’t speak a lot of it. And military hand signs are not all that useful to ask them why they’re crying.”

“Well, then, seems like they’re not the only ones I’ll have to teach it to, then.”

“Help me with that, and I’ll lay off on the hot spices in the food. For a while, at least. Leave you to build up a tolerance gradually this time,  _ laandur bur’cya _ .”

Obi-Wan hadn’t even thought about approaching it like an exchange.  _ Where’s the famed negotiator?  _ he wondered with amusement. He certainly wasn’t going to complain about what he’d get out of imparting this particular knowledge, however. His poor tongue still hadn’t recovered from that damned casserole; the Kaminoans must have done something to Rex’s taste buds for him to tolerate such high level of heat without a wince.

Or it was all Jango Fett’s doing. Mandalorians did have a thing for  _ heturam _ , the masochistic bastards. Satine had been particularly fond of a specific type of hot sauce even a human could smell from meters away; Obi-Wan sometimes experienced phantom pain when remembering the one time he’d let her convince him to try it with poultry. He’d wanted to die―right after he’d eaten it, of course, and then also several hours later for very different (and humiliating) reasons. 

Damn it, why was he thinking about it now?

“You have a deal,  _ jare’la bur’cya _ .” Truly, there was no way Obi-Wan would refuse such a boon. No way at all.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of Mando'a in this chapter, including newfangled words and vocabulary I had to cobble together. Despite my best intentions, I didn't become fluent. Beware.
> 
> 1)Solus verd’ika // One little soldier  
> Kotyc sha te shonar // Strong at (/in the face of) the wave  
> T’ad verd’ike // Two little soldiers  
> Kotyc’shya sha te shonar // Stronger at (/in the face of) the wave  
> Te shonar, te shonar // The wave, the wave
> 
> Aru’ese shonar // A wave of enemies  
> Solus aru’e // One enemy  
> Ta’raysh aru’ese // Five enemies  
> Olan aru’ese // One hundred enemies  
> Ta’raysholan aru’ese // A thousand enemies  
> Solet’ures aru’ese // Countless enemies
> 
> Kama ba kama // Kama to kama  
> T'ad verd'ike // Two little soldiers
> 
> Jii ta’raysholan aru’ese // Now (/Then) a thousand enemies  
> Jii olan aru’ese // Now (/Then) a hundred enemies  
> Jii ta’raysh aru’ese // Now (/Then) five enemies  
> Jii solus aru’e // Now (/Then) one enemy  
> Jii naasade aru’e // Now (/Then) no enemy
> 
> T’ad solus verd’ike // Two little soldiers as one  
> Ru’kotyc sha te shonar // Were strong at (/in the face of) the wave  
> R’akaani te shonar // Fought the wave  
> Ru’rohaka te shonar // Defeated the wave
> 
> T'ad solus verd'ike // Two little soldiers as one
> 
> 2) Jatisyc // delicious
> 
> 3) laandur bur’cya // delicate or fragile friend
> 
> 4) heturam // *mouthburn* - a sought-after state of intense burning in the mouth brought about by very spicy food
> 
> 5) jare’la bur’cya // reckless friend (jare'la = stupidly oblivious of danger, asking for it)
> 
> Comments give me life <3


	7. Like My Brother Before Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, writing that final chapter went faster than I expected. Does that make up for the huge stretches of time there has been between the previous updates?
> 
> Like always, thank you to Starofwinter and their constant emotional and creative support--this story wouldn't even exist if they hadn't encouraged me to write it from the very start.
> 
> Also, thanks to each and every one of you who commented; your nice words and compliments gave me the, the, the conviction? will? energy? to finish this story. Thanks for bearing with me and my delays. I hope you liked reading it as much I loved writing it.
> 
> In my mind, this is a HUGE verse; I hope to come back to it soon ;)

“Have you received news from your friend since he left?”

Rex faltered for a second, before shaking his head. One of the Larses’ vaporators had broken down during their weekly visit for lunch and he’d volunteered to help Cliegg repair it. The man’s prosthetic leg was nothing to write home about, depriving him of the mobility and stability needed to reach the broken components, and Owen was busy with something else. 

“Nah, he went dark. Safer that way, for him  _ and  _ for us. We didn’t really have time to establish secure communication protocols before he had to go. We will when he comes back, though, because I’m sure he’ll head out again sooner or later.”

Cliegg grunted, a pensive sound. “You sound so certain he’ll come back. Aren’t you worried? He’s been gone a while.”

Rex hesitated, frowning at the can of mechanical oil in his hands. “I know he’s okay.” He looked at Cliegg, daring him to contradict that declaration.

Lars Senior’s raised his eyebrows right back at him, of course. His wry expression was almost on par with his eldest son’s; Rex should have known better than to assume the old farmer was going to let that statement go so easily. 

Cliegg’s next words still surprised him. “My wife used to say the same about Ben when she was still alive. I could never entirely trust the Order’s reports on his continued well-being, but I could believe her.”

Rex swallowed around a dry throat. “She was… Force-sensitive?”

Cliegg nodded shallowly, making a so-so motion with his hand. “Not very, and she was untrained, but… yes. She called it having good instincts, or good senses, depending on her mood.”

Rex hmmed under his breath. “I know what you mean,” he admitted. Why the hell not? The Larses were family, now, and Rex had no reason to hide from them. Not like he’d needed to hide from the Kaminoans and the trainers when he was younger. He’d been afraid to be sent for reconditioning or, worst, termination. He’d already been singled out by his blond hair, the kind of spontaneous mutations the Kaminoans tolerated but weren’t happy about. He’d known better than to admit that he felt and sensed  _ things  _ his brothers did not. 

To this day, Rex didn’t know how Skywalker had known. Maybe he hadn’t, and offering him to spar with Tano and himself had only been curiosity, a desire to find out how clone troopers fared fighting with, beside and against Jedi. Maybe he’d only wanted to give Rex a better chance of surviving an encounter with Ventress or Dooku, and the best way to do that had been to explain to him how Jedi used their lightsabers and the Force. Maybe he’d let Rex listen to lessons he gave his Padawan only because he thought it couldn’t hurt anybody.

Yeah,  _ right _ . Rex rolled his eyes at himself. Because either of these explanations were  _ so very likely _ .

“I bet you do,” Cliegg said knowingly. “Maybe I’m overstepping, but what do you intend to do about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going to  _ stay  _ untrained?”

Rex blinked, shocked by the question and what it implied. “What do you want me to do? Ask Keno― _ Ben _ to train me along with the kids?”

Never mind that the twins were only four months old, and wouldn’t be in age to be taught about the Force for a few years yet. The possibility of ever getting  _ actual  _ Jedi training had never even occurred to Rex; the very suggestion seemed outrageous.

“Why not?” Cliegg asked, eyes full of quiet challenge. 

“Because  _ he wouldn’t _ .” 

“Are you sure about that?”

_ If  _ Rex had ever thought about asking Kenobi for Force-training before, he would have been absolutely certain of his housemate’s refusal. Now, however, Cliegg insistence made him doubt. 

The farmer must have spotted his sudden uncertainty, because he added, “I think he would, if you asked him.”

“It’s against the Jedi Order’s rules to train adults,” Rex reminded him. “Even if you don’t take my biological age into account,  _ thirteen  _ is supposed to be too old. My… your… Skywalker was only nine and it was still a huge scandal when Kenobi twisted the Council’s arm into accepting him as an Initiate.”

Not many people knew that, but Rex had been very curious about young Commander Skywalker when the 501st had been fostered on him. He’d kept being curious when his commander had become his General, one of the most famous Jedi Knight in the galaxy. He’d listened to all the rumours and stories he could put his hands on, and had managed to paint a portrait of his General’s past he hadn’t liked the look of. At all.

“Right now, Rex, I don’t think Ben is all that fond of the Order as a whole.”

Rex frowned, uneasy about what the affirmation implied. “I’m not sure taking advantage of his―his crisis of faith to get my way is very ethical.”

Cliegg raised his eyebrows again. “You already did. He’s not leading a very Jedi life right now, is he?”

Rex felt his heart clench and bit down on an instinctive denial of the accusation. He knew, deep down, that Lars Senior had a point. He’d been feeling bad about it for a while now, even more so after Kenobi’s breakdown the other week. Rex  _ had  _ used Kenobi’s own guilt and confusion to manipulate him, first in coming with them, then in accepting all his decisions concerning the kids and the way they would be raised. 

Rex knew it, okay? And he was trying to do better; he just didn’t quite know how to go about it. He looked back at Cliegg now, wondering what he thought about the whole thing. “I don’t know what to do,” he finally admitted.

Cliegg’s expression softened. “I wouldn’t know what to do in your situation either, son. But if I had one advice, it would be to talk to him about  _ all  _ of it. Maybe you’ll both get a better idea of what to do if you put your heads together.”

Rex twitched, trying to remain straight-faced. 

“Not like  _ that _ ,” Cliegg added, back to sounding entertained as Rex felt himself flush under his beard. “I don’t think either of you are in any kind of state for  _ that  _ to be a good idea right now.”

And wasn’t that the Stars’ own truth. Rex shook his head, cheeks still hot with mortification. “Definitely not.”

Not right then, and maybe not ever. Hells, Rex didn’t think he could even  _ admit  _ to the existence of a “totally, entirely  _ professional  _ admiration of General Kenobi’s style” without melting into a puddle of embarrassment. He would rather shoot his own foot, thank you very much.

Cliegg poked him in the chest, calling him back from his horrified thoughts. “Talk about everything else, though.”

Rex brushed his hand off. “Yeah, sure.”

“You  _ better _ , young man.”

Rex shook his head, amused and touched by the man’s concern. “I said  _ sure…  _ old man.” 

Cliegg huffed and puffed, muttering about ‘young ingrates’, but he was smiling gruffly and Rex didn’t take back his teasing words. He never had to navigate that kind of relationship, before; Skywalker had been a brother more than anything else, and the rest of the Jedi had been estimated superiors. Let’s not even talk about the trainers or the Kaminoans.

Barely four months since they’d showed up out of the blue, and Cliegg Lars was already settling into a parental figure not only to his own estranged son, but to that son’s…  _ housemate…  _ too. 

_ Aliit ori'shya tal'din _ , indeed.

…

“I don’t understand how I could be Force-sensitive while the rest of my brothers aren’t.” 

Rex’s newfound habit of dropping conversational bombs without warning was going to get old really fast, Obi-Wan thought warily. Apparently, after months spent avoiding the question every time it could have come up, they were finally going to talk about it while replacing the landspeeder’s thrusters. Obi-Wan really shouldn’t have been surprised; Rex obviously was more confident about carrying crucial conversations when he could pretend to be concentrating on a physical task. 

Obi-Wan contemplated his answer for a while; he’d poked at the question half-regularly during the last four months and had sketched up some hypotheses. Despite the potential minefield this conversation represented, he was glad to discuss his tentative conclusions with someone who was in a prime position to validate them (or shot them down with torpedos). 

“Without delving too deep into theories of genetics, your siblings and yourself _ aren’t _ all perfect genetical copies of each other,” he finally opened with, since that was something the Jedi searchers the Council had assigned to ‘solve the double-aging problem’ had established from the get-go. “The Kaminoans didn’t just copy Jango Fett’s DNA, they  _ modified  _ it; they were trying to create the perfect soldier, so they felt they needed to reduce Fett’s natural independence and curb his aggressive nature, they wanted you to learn faster, to be more endurant, to go longer without rations or water, etc. Doing that, though, they introduced variations into the gene pool: variations to the genes themselves and variations to the  _ expression  _ of those genes. And  _ that’s _ not an hypothesis.  _ It’s _ a fact.”

Obi-Wan looked at Rex to make sure he was following the explanation; Rex just nodded. His expression was a bit pinched, but mostly thoughtful. Pensive. Interested.

“Mandalore has always been and still is a genetic melting pot. As long as they could mostly fit in a Mandalorian armor and were willing to abide the Resol’nare, Near-human species were welcome to join. To be honest, I would be very surprised if Jango Fett’s genes were all human in origin. Most Mandos aren’t. What we  _ do  _ know with certitude is that he had some blonde ancestry,” he added, referring to Rex’s own natural coloration. “You were not the only trooper with paler hair; we’ve also observed variations in skin tone, in eye color, even slight variations in height. There are even a few troopers who almost looks like dark-skinned Arkanians.” 

This time Rex nodded. “Yeah, there was one in Jango’s Hundred. Cin’ciri. He was one of the few Second Gen  _ vode  _ we actually liked.”

That sentence hinted at a world of issues Obi-Wan wasn’t ready to poke at yet. He continued, “As for the Force, we’re now in the domain of conjectures. Because while we’re mostly certain that the ability to sense or use it is rooted in genetics, we’re still not quite sure  _ how  _ it works. Sometimes it seems to spring up from nowhere… until you delve a little bit deeper in biological family trees and hear the stories about some great-great-grandparents who were well-known for their ‘good instincts’ or their talent for Sabbac or other bluff games’.”

Rex smirked, huffing a small laugh under his breath. “Don’t even try. I’m not playing Sabbac against you ever again.”

Obi-Wan snorted. “You sound like Cody,” he teased automatically. Then he  _ remembered _ and had to take a few deep breaths to swallow back the urge to sob or scream. Or both. Rex’ hand landed on his arm, squeezing hard enough to bruise. Obi-Wan didn’t shake him off; the heavy pressure helped to ground him.

It took a while before he could come back to the subject at hand. “All that to say, maybe Fett wasn’t a  _ complete  _ Null on the scale of Force-sensitivity, and your ‘Force genes’ just expressed themselves more strongly than his and your siblings’ did.” 

He shrugged self-consciously. “This is only a hypothesis, of course. What’s more, it’s an hypothesis that contradict many of our most commonly accepted teachings. Of course, you’ve all been very good at putting those through the grinders and rendering them obsolete.”

Obi-Wan then looked at Rex from the corners of his eyes, trying to gauge his reaction to that potential explanation. His housemate was frowning down at nothing in particular, deep in thoughts.

“I never told anyone about what I could feel and sense that my brothers obviously didn’t,” Rex finally admitted after a while. “I was already standing out from the rest of my batch because of my hair; I was afraid to be even  _ more  _ different from the rest. I didn’t want to be reeducated or culled. That’s what happened to brothers who diverged too much from the ‘desirable template’. If what you speculated about Zabrak and other Near-human genes was true for Fett, maybe embryos or babies who showed signs of developing horns or feathers were sent down the drain along with those who couldn’t learn fast enough or weren’t as strong as the rest of us.”

‘Sent down the drain’.  _ Force and Stars _ . Obi-Wan didn’t have much shock left in him where the clones’ making and upbringing were concerned; his heart had been broken a thousand times already, whenever  he discovered or heard about a new casual horror. 

He could still feel angry, however. He didn’t know how good of a thing it was. 

“I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t mean much, or anything, really, but I’m sorry. That you and your siblings had to live like that.”  _ When you lived _ . The Council had known that culling had taken place before they discovered the existence of ‘their’ army; that’s why Shaak Ti had been posted there permanently. They just never thought… 

“It does mean something, to know it wouldn’t have been the same if you’d know about us sooner,” Rex disagreed. “And to be entirely fair, Fett, Skirata and some of the other Cuy’val Dar did try to curb the Kaminoans’ culling tendencies, mostly by arguing that not all positions in an army required the same skills or abilities, and that hair color was neither there nor there when it came to capacity. Still, there were limits to how much failures Ko Sai and Nala Se were willing to tolerate the sight of.” 

Rex naming two specific Kaminoans amongst all the others probably spoke volumes about their character, and Obi-Wan stocked the information in the back of his mind. He had no idea why, because what could he even do with it? He’d already cultivated enough resentment against the Kaminoan scientists and Jango Fett through the years of the war, he really didn’t need any more grudges to nurture.

Rex interrupted this dangerous thread of thought, in a voice tentative enough to prickle Obi-Wan’s senses. “Say Fett had blundered much sooner, and someone had followed him to Kamino and discovered us… Would―”

He shook his head slightly, looking simultaneously apprehensive and defiant, but still continued in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible, “Would have I been sent to the Temple, if someone  _ had  _ noticed that I wasn’t  _ not  _ Force-sensitive?”

Obi-Wan blinked, thrown by the question. He hadn’t seen it coming. Maybe he should have.

“I don’t know, Rex. Honestly, I don’t. It would have depended on a lot of factors―mainly your midichlorian count, your temperament… and your age, of course,” he added somewhat more bitterly than he’d intended.

Rex’ look was shrewd. “Why is the question of age so important? I’ve seen some episodes of the old  _ Sunrider  _ holographic series, you know, and I checked the databases after. Nomi Sunrider was already an adult and a widow when she started on the ‘Jedi Path’.”

Obi-Wan felt his mouth twitch despite himself.  _ Anakin asked me the exact same question… and many similar ones, so often I lost count _ , he didn’t say. What he confirmed was, “Before the Ruusan reformation, it was pretty common to see Padawans learners of all ages, from all kinds of background.” 

Which was, maybe not so incidentally, the very thing he’d said to Anakin.

“Why did it change?”

Again, the same following question.

“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan admitted, changing the script without quite meaning to. The echos had been getting too upsetting to finish the conversation the same way he had, so many years ago. 

Rex’ eyebrows jumped up, the rest of his expression deeply sceptical. 

“It’s true,” Obi-Wan insisted. “The reasons evoked in my history classes were… flunky at best. Circunstancial. But I wasn’t about to say so. I had no reason to question it, until Anakin.”

He swallowed. “Even then, I didn’t question it enough.”

_ Don’t question things  _ seemed to have become his rule of thumb sometimes after Melida/Daan and his teenage adventures on Mandalore with Satine. Of course, he’d never questioned that stance, either… not until the war. And after Geonosis he’d been too damned busy all the fucking time to do anything about the uncomfortable answers (or lack of) the questions had been dredging up. 

“And now?” Rex asked, back to looking tense and worried.

Obi-Wan frowned, puzzled. “What do you mean, ‘and now’?”

Rex swallowed audibly. “And now, would you train me?”

Obi-Wan blinked. Then he blinked again, realizing with detachment he’d fallen from his previous crouch beside the landspeeder to a sitting position on the dust floor of the garage. His ass, he noted without concern, hurted. He must have fallen down hard. 

“Is that a joke?” he asked, hearing his voice as if it was coming from the other side of the room. 

Despite how remote he felt from the current happenings, Obi-Wan still catched the moment when Rex’ face closed off and he made as if to get up. He reached out instinctively, clutching Rex’ arm. “Alright, not a joke. Very well. Would you just… seat down for a moment, please?” 

Rex sat back down with a wary expression painted on his face. Then he sighed. “Sorry for blurting it out like that.”

Obi-Wan dredged up a smile, having come back to reality. “It’s… okay. Just surprising. Very much so.” He breathed deeply, trying to find his center  _ again _ . “Why are you asking me?”

Rex raised a contemptuous eyebrow, before looking around them pointedly. “You see another Jedi Master around? Because I don’t.”

Obi-Wan huffed, pinching his arm in revenge for the mocking. “I’m… not the best choice.”

Rex closed his eyes, looking pained and exasperated. “I thought it was about my potential as a student, not yours as a teacher.”

For some reason, Rex’ choice of terms calmed Obi-Wan’s rising feeling of dread. Somewhat. A bit. Still…

“I failed my first and unique Padawan so deeply he―” Obi-Wan couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out, his dry throat clamping on it with vengeance. He tried swallowing, but it remained stuck, the weight of his guilt and remorse threatening to choke him.

Rex’ twisted his hand to return Obi-Wan’s clasp. He squeezed his forearm, before shaking it slightly. “ _ That’s not true _ , Kenobi. Obi-Wan. Ben,  _ whatever _ , it’s not your fault.”

Obi-Wan frowned. “You said so yourself!”

Rex closed his eyes, looking pained. “And I was wrong.”

Obi-Wan felt deeply sceptical about this affirmation. “I was his  _ Master _ .”

“OK, say I was  _ partially  _ wrong. Ninety percent wrong, at least.”

Obi-Wan huffed again. “So it was only ten percent my fault? Sorry, my friend, but I think your calculations are sloppy. I dispute those numbers!”

Rex groaned, exasperated. “I don’t know what happened either, you know? I would never have thought… I mean, he was kind of a bastard sometimes, and he was very pragmatic. By moments, maybe  _ too  _ pragmatic. Especially by Jedi standards. And I can understand how ruthlessness can be as much of a tool for, for  _ genocide  _ as for necessary actions against Evil with a capital E. I really do, believe me. Still… what we saw, that wasn’t ruthlessness. That was madness. And I don’t understand how  _ flirting  _ with the Dark Side of the Force could transform a man with his heart mostly in the right place into a child-killing monster  _ just like that _ .” He snapped his fingers, making Obi-Wan jump despite himself. 

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Rex continued, frowning. “It’s supposed to be like a power trip, isn’t? See, power trip describe Dooku very well. But Dooku wasn’t  _ unhinged _ . He wasn’t mad.”

Obi-Wan blinked. “Falling is like succumbing to the worse parts of yourself,” he said. “I raised Anakin since he was  _ nine years old _ , Rex. I’ve known him for fourteen years. How could I not see that a child-murdering machine was lurking somewhere in his mind?”

Rex sighed, before squeezing his arm. “I wish I’d read more about human psychology, so I could theorize what his problem was a bit more knowledgeably. But from what Artoo told us―”

“Wait, you asked the droid―”

Rex’ look was chiding. “Who were we going to ask, you? You looked like you would fall apart if someone poked you a bit too hard. But we― _ I _ ―needed to know. And I already didn’t like what General Yoda was saying about anything, I wasn’t about to encourage him by asking questions.”

That did put the meetings carried at the medical facility of Poliss Massa in a new perspective. At the time, Obi-Wan hadn’t been in any state of mind to notice Rex’ discomfort beside his obvious shock and anger. With hindsight, he’d more recently put the commander’s stubborn expression on the count of him already planning to kidnap the babies. Apparently, scheming hadn’t been all there had been to it, either. “Very well. And what did Artoo say?”

“That Skywalker didn’t speak to him. Didn’t talk to him. Just ordered him to prep his fighter and then disembarked without a word. Artoo said that… that he wasn’t even sure if it was Skywalker. He said Skywalker acted like―like a droid after a mind wipe.”

That was… more acute that Obi-Wan would have thought a droid’s assessment of a human psychological state could be. Rex seemed to catch on his surprise, because he smiled bitterly. “We’ve all underestimated that droid, many times, but Skywalker never did. He always treated him like a sentient being. To be honest, sometimes he treated him  _ better  _ than he did most sentient beings.

“And beside that, how he assaulted Amidala? That’s so far from how he’d ever treated her before as to be the actions of someone else, Artoo said. I don’t mean to say it like people who hide their true natures don’t exist, because we both know they do, but… Maybe that’s not the whole of that explanation. I’m sure it’s not even the most of that explanation. And if anyone would know, it would be Artoo, because he was always following Skywalker, even when Skywalker was with Amidala or alone or without organic sentient company. You’d think  _ he  _ would have seen it coming, even if we didn’t.”

“You and Artoo are implying he had, what, a psychotic break? Falling do that, sometimes.”

“I don’t think it does,” Rex contradicted, rather boldly for someone who had been rubbing elbows with Jedi for barely more than three years. “I’ve heard a lot of things, you know, rumours about Fallen Jedi during the war. My brothers are  _ big  _ gossips. I’ve also heard Jedi theories about Falling and the Dark Side. But it seems to me that sudden Falls make much more sense if they’re  _ caused  _ by psychotic breaks, rather than the opposite.”

Obi-Wan looked at him, speechless. 

“It does,” Rex insisted, frowning. “We should ask Artoo for more exact numbers, but―”

“Did he compile  _ statistics  _ about Fallen Jedi?” Obi-Wan interrupted again, mind reeling in several directions. It was dizzying.

“Of course he did.” Rex’ expression was wry. “He compiles statistics about everything and everyone he doesn’t understand from the get go. Why do you think he gets on so well with Echo? Echo’s cybernetics gave his brain the capacity of a very powerful portable computer; Artoo seems to have  _ developed true sentience _ sometimes along the way: they’re a lot alike.”

He continued before Obi-Wan could remind him of the millenia-old Republic ruling against sentient droids. “Like I said, we should ask Artoo what he thinks about all that. I’m sure he’s got his own hypotheses and they’ll probably be a slight more useful than self-flagellation.”

“Why now?” Obi-Wan insisted.

Rex shrugged, looking uneasy and slightly ashamed. “Because the shock is finally fading and I can think about it without breaking in half. I don’t want to just―assume things. I don’t think it would be a good idea to just rule out all traditional Jedi teachings, anymore than to trust in them blindly.”

He poked Obi-Wan in the chest. “I’d like to remind you that you’ll need to teach the twins the ‘ways of the Force’ sooner or later,  _ Master Kenobi _ . And I don’t know for you, but I would prefer if  _ I _ was your lab rat, not them. I’m an adult, I already know right from wrong, good from evil, dark from light, and the grey zone in-between. I’m not so easy to manipulate anymore. I’ve had my lesson concerning uncompromising doctrines and blind loyalty, several times over. Trust me, I’ll question  _ everything _ .”

Obi-Wan seized Rex’ finger to keep him from poking again. That  _ hurt _ . “This is going to be such a mess,” he predicted, mournful.

Rex’ eyes crinkled. “Good thing we’re pretty good at waddling through messes together, then, isn’t it?”

…

“Yoda is going to kill me,” Rex heard Kenobi mutter under his breath much later that night. “He’ll use his stick to beat me to death, then he’ll heal me to do it all over again.”

Rex lowered his datapad to look at his housemate with his best judging look. “You could take him.”

“I most certainly could not!” Kenobi’s tone was scandalized. 

His expression, too, but then it had continuously swung wildly between outrage, dismay and shock the whole time Artoo had spent bringing them up to date on his research via their datapads. He’d been in no state to take care of the twins, and Rex had tackled feeding them, washing them and putting them to bed with Threepio for only support while his housemate and Artoo argued vehemently. He was back to not feeling very charitable about Kenobi’s hangups.

Rex rolled his eyes. “Come on, he’ll be much older by the time you see him again and hermitting in a swamp is bound to age him even further. In the worst case scenarios, I’ll probably be trained by then and I’ll take him for you, no problem.”

“You’re far too arrogant to make a good Jedi,” Kenobi muttered again, slumping back in his seat with dramatic flair. “I must be mad to even entertain the idea.”

Rex threw him a lonely sock he’d mended a bit sooner in the evening. It landed square on Kenobi’s head; the man was lucky it was clean. “Stop worrying about making me a ‘good’ Jedi. I certainly won’t be, not by the Order’ recent standards. There’s much worse things I could become than a ‘bad Jedi’, anyway.”

Kenobi glowered at him, the sock still dangling from his ear. “This isn’t as reassuring as you seem to think it is.”

Rex threw another sock. This one Kenobi catched, rolled it up with the other and threw right back at him. Rex snatched the ball up from the air without even looking, smirking smuggly. It was Kenobi’s turn to roll his eyes. “Show off,” he groused.

“Like you’re one to talk, Obi-Wan ‘flashy tricks’ Kenobi.” Rex continued before his housemate could protest the title. “Come on. Teach me the ways of the Force and I’ll take care of not going all Sith on you, alright?”

Kenobi slapped both hands on his face. “Shut up, Rex. Just… shut up.”

Rex took pity on him and shut up. For now.

… 

“I can’t believe I’m even contemplating doing it.”

“Yes, you can,” Rex replied, unworried. 

It was close to dawn, Tatoo I was barely peeking over the horizon and they were both sitting cross-legged in the sand outside their door. The way Rex saw things, he’d already won the argument. It had only taken a week; a bit less that he would have betted on after their first conversation on the subject. 

Artoo was still in sleeping mode in the twins’ bedroom, Threepio still recharging in the garage, and they were alone for what would be his ‘first’ meditation session.

“So, do I call you ‘Master’?” He hoped not. That would make his tiny, barely-there ‘professional infatuation’ even more awkward that it already was. 

“Don’t you  _ fucking  _ dare,” Kenobi hissed, glaring at him with eyes still slightly red from restless sleep (Rex had heard him rise and walk a couple times through the night; neither of them seemed to have slept really well at all). “Just go with Ben. It’s time we get in the habit, anyway, even at home.”

“Alright…  _ Ben _ . Teach me your ways.”

“I’m going to regret it,”  _ Ben  _ said again, not for the first time (and certainly not for the last time; Rex knew himself well enough to predict a lot of similar mutterings in their future).

(He was okay with that.)

“Alright,” Ben sighed after a minute of silence had passed. “Let’s try meditation. Don’t worry if you don’t manage to really touch the Force the first time… or even the second or the third. Really, learning to sense and use the Force  _ consciously _ with any kind of reliability is a long and arduous process that can last for years.”

Rex didn’t tell him he already could touch the Force, sometimes, when he concentrated hard or really wanted to. He’d just never dared do it very often, before. Those times could have been flukes, but probably not. They would see, soon enough.

For now he closed his eyes like Skywalker had once told him to do, when Rex had admitted to experiencing nightmares sometimes after the Umbarra debacle.  _ Meditation _ , Skywalker had said,  _ isn’t just for Jedi. It can help you clear your mind, if only so you can sleep better _ . And it had worked, to a point. Rex wouldn’t have coped so well with the following months if he hadn’t mastered that particular skill.

Rex concentrated on his breath, on the grains of sand sliding through his hands, on the sunrays caressing his face…

And went down.

…

Rex took to meditation like a duckling to water, which surprised Obi-Wan maybe more that it should have. To his defence, Anakin had had  _ enormous _ difficulty with it; standing still and serene had never been his forte. Obi-Wan making the decision to jump ahead directly to slow variants of katas had been their sorely needed breakthrough. For some reason, he’d thought Rex would experience the same predicament.

Obi-Wan had forgotten that Rex had probably learned to stand still a long time ago, if only for parade rest. While he regretted the circumstances (and probably the methods) of those teachings, they now came in use to Rex. But despite being several steps ahead of most Initiates and Obi-Wan’s unusual Padawan, Rex’ immediate and relentless progress was still all kinds of amazing.

Obi-Wan still couldn’t stand how empty the Force had felt since Order 66 had wiped out most the galaxy’s trained Force-sensitives. He knew he would need to get used to it, sooner rather later, but he was willing to put off the inevitable a little bit longer. For now, he did breathing exercises and watched Rex with trepidation as he waded in the ripples of the Force with care but no fear for what lurked in the depths. It was nerve-racking, yes, but also… almost reassuring.  

Rex’s confidence in his own abilities was gratifying to witness, especially since it was rooted in self-awareness rather than delusions of grandeur. He was no adolescent searching for his identity; he’d already led legions into battle, he’d inspired respect wherever he went and he’d looked Evil in the eye… just before he spat in its face, every time.

Rex had been raised to be only one pawn in the multitude, yet he’d started distinguishing himself the moment he’d been free of Kamino’s overbearing shadows. Like he’d told Obi-Wan, he was a grown man; more than that, he was a man who knew his worth and trusted in his own competence. He went about learning to use the Force like he was just adding a new skill set to his already impressive collection. Nice, useful, potentially fun, but in no way reflective of his intrinsic value. 

Each morning, Obi-Wan felt some of his reservations about this course of action fly away with the dusty wind. On the dawn of the fourth, he awoke with the certainty he couldn’t fuck up Rex even if he tried. 

These ancient Jedi might have been on to something.  _ Sorry, Master Yoda _ .

“What did Anakin teach you, exactly?” he finally asked as Rex was coming up from a deep meditation. Five pebbles were flying around him in lazy twirls, slow but steady.

It took a while before Rex answered, eyes still closed in quiet concentration. The pebbles didn’t falter at all, which showed impressive control. “Nothing formal. He explained what I could expect from Ventress and Dooku, and how they did it, so I could fight them. He sparred with me, and made Tano spar with me,  _ and  _ sparred with her in front of me, to make sure I wasn’t easy prey for the Sith. Some empty-handed katas, to learn to move faster and lighter. Some meditation techniques, so I could sleep better after―after Umbarra.”

Obi-Wan winced. Fucking Umbarra. Arguably one of the worst messes of the whole war, one  _ he  _ still had nightmares about.

“Honestly, it could have been perfectly innocent, but…”

They exchanged a look.  _ But  _ Anakin had never been really subtle. Or so had Obi-Wan thought: he’d had no idea, none, that Rex was receiving Jedi training.

More surprising, however, was that despite the roundabout way Anakin had gone about it, his teaching had still been extraordinarily effective. But then, the pace of Ashoka apprenticeship had been nothing short of exceptional, too.

And she’d been right. She’d been so, so right about  _ everything _ . 

“Alright,” Obi-Wan finally said, making a decision. To his great surprise, he was perfectly at peace with it. “You already know more than I thought, then, and that’s without counting all your previous military training. We could step up the pace, if you want.”

Rex finally opened his eyes, squinting slightly in the morning sun; the light of Tatoo I was throwing his face into sharp relief. He turned to look at Obi-Wan, glowing inside and out. “What do you mean?”

Obi-Wan swallowed, throat suddenly dry for reasons he wasn’t ready to examine too closely. Not yet. Instead he reached in the folds of the oversized, frayed tunic he preferred to wear in the house. He took out the object he’d slipped there sooner that morning, acting on a hunch.

Rex eyes grew impossibly wide and the pebbles dropped all at once in the sand. “Now  _ you’re  _ joking.”

Obi-Wan snorted. “Not about that. Never about that.”

He turned the handle in his hands, looking at the clean, yet elegant design. “Back when I was still going with Yoda’s plan, I thought it would go to Luke. Now, though… there’s no way I could choose between him and Leia, decide who’s worthy of it the most. But it could be yours, until you’re ready to make your own. Or forever. Your choice.”

He looked back at Rex, trying to make the last point very clear. “Your  _ choice _ . Always.”

Rex took a deep breath, then another, then a third, before closing his eyes. His eyelids were still lowered when he reached a hand out and turned it palm up, fingers open and shaking slightly. His breathing calmed down gradually, going back to its previous serene rhythm. 

_ Passion, yet serenity _ .

Obi-Wan took a breath of his own, before slowly dropping Anakin’s lightsaber in Rex’s hand. How he managed to let it go was a mystery. Maybe it was the Force, guiding his hand, giving him the strength he needed despite how stubbornly he’d been shuning it for months.

Rex’ fingers closed over the handle. His eyes opened. They were overflowing with tears and a bone-deep certainty. 

_ Emotion, yet peace. _

Rex breathed out as his thumb found the activation button without needing to look.

Blue light surged up, outshining the rising suns. 

  
  
  


(This is not) THE END

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been waiting to write that scene SINCE THE START =D I hope you loved it.
> 
> Where is Echo, you ask? On his own mission, I answer. 
> 
> I'm currently plotting out the next fic in the verse, which will probably be titled 'Starfall' or something in the same vein. I don't know when it's gonna come out, especially since I intend to finish it before I start posting the chapters (I've learned that lesson). Better subscribe to the series itself to be sure you receive the notification!
> 
> I'm also working towards a revised, fully fleshed-out version of Resol'nare: 1) clearer premise, 2) straightened timeline, 3) more (and better) Mando'a, 4) some clarifications, 5) MOAR DROIDS, 6) a couple of other things I didn't think about or jumped over the first time around, etc. //////// If you have suggestions about things you wish had been explained more clearly or scenes that should have been less summarized, don't hesitate to mention it in the comments! 
> 
> When I finish the Revised Version, I'll post a notice as a 8th chapter (maybe with an epilogue, who knows?). Until then, see you on Tumblr and May the Force be with you!

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on my Tumblr under the same pseudo. You're welcome to talk to me anytime !  
> 


End file.
